


Their Weaknesses

by ghuune



Category: Dark Angel
Genre: Blood and Gore, Breeding Cult, Disability, Eventual Smut, F/M, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Love Triangles, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mild Angst, Mind Control, Pining, Seizures, Slow Burn, Telepathy, Terminal City, Transgenic War, UST, Viral Apocalypse, bloodjunkie!logan, this fic got away from me and I'm not the slightest bit sorry, treats Original Cindy exactly as the show did: badly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2017-03-18
Packaged: 2018-08-16 00:38:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8080015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghuune/pseuds/ghuune
Summary: Terminal City: last hope for transgenics. In the midst of a guerrilla war, Max Guevara must choose between the man she thought was her one true love and her tempting, tempestuous, infuriating lieutenant commander. Both men are keeping secrets from her, even as she holds her own secrets close inside her heart. POV shared between Max and Alec, and Logan's not at his best in this fic.(Initially started as a stand-alone, so there's a -massive- stylistic shift between Chapters 1 and 2).





	1. Chapter 1

I.  
Something different about her.

He sipped his whiskey and twitched every time she came up for a refill and a few rounds of banter with him. Invisible wire stretched from her sternum to his vertebrae: he felt her movements in his spine. Something different. What was it?

She invited him to her table with a smile that seemed sincere, but he turned it aside with a sneer and a flick of his hand. He liked being close to her a little too much tonight, and he knew by now that meant _stay away._ She wanted to wallow in doom, that was her business, but he didn't have to sentence himself to the same fate. She couldn't touch Logan, he couldn't touch her: a whole party of nobody touching nobody. That sure sounded like fun. He grimaced and sipped his whiskey.

And yet he still kept tabs on her through the reflection in that handy barback mirror. Nothing different. Same clear olive skin, brilliant eyes, lips like pillows. Same perfect figure, taut butt, slender doe legs, which moved him even though it'd been designed by the same perverts who'd designed him. And wasn't that a fun thought? His cock, modeled in wireframe on a computer screen, studied in all its glorious 360 by some guy who smelled like Fritos, before he'd even been conceived. Designed for maximum use, just like the rest of him. 

Something different.

She stopped by again and she didn't have the pitcher in her hand, which meant she'd come by just to talk. Lucky him. He turned to her to tell her in no uncertain terms to get the hell away from him unless she meant to climb aboard and that was when it hit him. The difference.

Her smell.

It was her smell that had him feeling raw-edged and aggressive, a kind of squirmy, restless-legs itch beneath his skin that made him want to run or brawl to get rid of it. 

Oh fuck no.

She was still standing there, waiting for him to climb out of his head and acknowledge her, so it wasn't bad yet. She probably wasn't even aware it was coming on. Didn't she keep a calendar or something? This was totally irresponsible, utterly against regs, and... _she wasn't Manticore._

For all his talk about living high and free, he was still Manticore's wind-up toy.

He finished his whiskey.

“You know the date, Maxie?” he asked.

“September the tenth,” she said.

He subtracted six months from that as he gestured for another drink. His metabolism did neat things with booze: a stiff drink, taken fast, barreled through him and made him drunk for five minutes, then evaporated with no aftereffects. 

So he gulped the new drink and waited for it to hit before he said, “Remember what you were doing March the eleventh?”

“What is this, some kind of dumb game?” she said. “Eidetic memory, factory installed. 'Course I remember.”

He waited. The alcohol warmed him, not that he needed it. Her scent, her closeness, did a fine job without it.

She wasn't answering him. She needed a prompt. “So what were you doing that day, Max?”

He glanced to the side and saw the penny drop, like a nuke on an island city. She was slumped against the bar, her hand on her forehead, frozen in the act of raking her hair out of her face. He grinned. “Or should I say, who?” 

“God,” she moaned.

“Wow,” he said, raising the drink. “You do get around.”

II.  
She hadn't appreciated that joke, but she let him escort her home. He must have been crazy to offer. Hormones. The geeks at Manticore just loved hormones, pheromones, all those little subliminal diplomats. They wanted their infiltrators to talk a good game, move non-threateningly, put out the right smells. Alec had what his ops manager back in the Core used to call “an elite-level pheromone profile.” Geek speak. He put out the right smells.

Only right now he was on the receiving end of Manticore's chemical warfare, and he didn't appreciate it one little bit. 

He should never have offered to escort her home, never ever. Every inch of him liked the idea way too much, and she was spoken-for. Sure, by a guy who couldn't touch her without coming down with an extreme case of _death,_ but they both seemed married to the idea of making it happen, and who the hell was he to judge? 

He saw her into her apartment. She made a beeline for her bedroom as he hovered by the door, not knowing what to do with his hands. Walk through it, man. Simple. First step was to say “Good night.” Easiest fucking thing in the world. “Good night, Max.” 

What came out instead: “Where's Original Cindy?”

“I think she's gone cherchez la femme,” Max said from her bedroom. 

Getting to be a popular pastime. The door, 494. Turn around, grab the handle, get the hell out. 

But she reappeared. She leaned against the jamb of the door to her room, watching him. Her eyes were huge and vulnerable.

“This...” she said. “Do you know anything about this? What did they do when this happened, at Manticore?”

“I know they thanked their lucky stars for it when they started that breeding program,” he said. 

“Does this—”she gestured to herself, “—happen to you?”

“Um, yeah. Something like it, anyway,” he said, moving away from his exit, towards her, his footsteps heavy with irony and self-loathing. But... shit. She knew nothing about herself. Nothing. What little he knew, he felt obligated to share.

"The girl who marched in front of me in my unit? We were at chow one day. You remember, heads bobbing in lines, maintain your interval. Only this girl, 466, she didn't want to maintain her interval. She kept backing up on me. Or I kept running up on her. Got blurry after awhile, who was doing what.”

His pulse synced to the sound of the marching, making the floor throb, the walls, everything. The smell of X5-466's hair. He'd never noticed it before, but today he couldn't get away from it. He wanted to taste the smooth space behind her ears. He wanted to reach for her hips and haul her back against him. Eight inches wasn't there yet, but what was liked the hard curve of her buttocks when they made contact. At thirteen, she was taller than he was, stronger, but right then he felt like being _bigger_ than her somehow. He wanted her to look up at him. He was thirteen years old and he didn't understand shit and he wanted to touch her and he couldn't and he wanted to be bigger and he wasn't.

“Yeah, I embarrassed myself,” he said. 

“You shoot your wad?” Max asked, and grinned, a little embarrassed at the crudity of her bald question.

“No," he snorted. "I wish. Way worse. I burst into tears. Guess that clued in the higher-ups, cos X5-466 got diverted the next day.”

“Diverted?” He was standing too close to her. He could feel her body heat. Goddammit, but he wasn't in control of this at all and he hated that. 

“Yeah, they figured they'd turn the bug into a feature. Started a whole separate division.”

“Spy whores,” Max said. She scuffed the floor with her foot. 

“Probably,” he said. He tried to step out of her space, but it just wasn't happening. “What did you do, out here? How did you handle it?” Twelve years old, thirteen years old, how old were you, _who went there?_ That's what he really wanted to know.

“Unsuccessfully,” she said, in a voice filled with ghosts.

Suddenly she was in his arms. He was hard, but ignoring it; that wasn't what this was about, and he couldn't be blamed for that reflex. He just wanted to comfort her somehow. No, that wasn't right. He wanted to comfort himself. 

What the hell for though? he wondered with black humor. His body didn't get hijacked every six months. He didn't lose the ability to select his partners. She'd been raped every six months like clockwork for how many years? She'd consented, but she'd never consented, not in her heart. But her voice had said “yes” and in the eyes of the law, that was what mattered. 

He understood how it felt. Yeah, okay, there was no way he could _ever truly_ and all that, but he understood anyway. He'd been Manticore's weapon. He'd murdered for them. That stained his soul, and it wasn't gonna wash clean, because even though he'd been manipulated, brainwashed, trained and bred... he'd consented with his voice.

So he had to let her go, and he had to get the hell out of this apartment, and she had to get on with it, with what her body needed her to do. That was the only way this could go down.

And then he had an idea. 

III.  
“You want to _babysit_ me?” 

“That's the offer,” he said. He drummed his fingers on the counter, shifted a metal can filled with long-handled whisks and ladles so the light broke in a more interesting way off its surface. Glanced at her.

She paced along the windows at the far end of the room, arms crossed beneath her breasts, hands gripping her elbows. Her nipples were hard, and he hated himself for noticing. 

“So you're saying you want to tie me down and then sit in a chair and stare at me like some kind of sick weirdo—no! Hell no!” 

“You want to go through a heat without dragging some nobody into your life, hating yourself, betraying Logan, right?” 

“Yeah, that'd be nice,” she gritted out.

“So you have a shot at it if someone who understood things was here with you,” he said. Someone strong enough to kick your ass if you happened to break free, he didn't add.

“And that's you?” Max's eyes flashed. “The guy who was holding a gun against my hip not half an hour ago during what was meant to be—I'm assuming, here—an innocent hug?”

“Aw, c'mon, you can't blame me for that,” he said. He met her eyes in a challenge. “Any more than I can blame you for that little grind you did at the end, huh? Fair enough?”

She broke the stare first. “I guess,” she grumbled. She paced, then whirled and stared him down. “Why?”

“Why? Why, what? What why?”

“Why do you give a shit what happens during my heat?”

He was halfway through a sentence about how she got him all wrong and then he stopped, backtracked, and sighed. “Cos Rachel,” he said.

Max looked blank. The thing about Max? She had endless patience and compassion for everyone in the world who was not him. When he was in the room with her, the Max Show played on every channel, and the commercials featured Logan. He usually took it as a compliment. He was the one person in her life who didn't claw at her, needing her. She could be self-absorbed around him because she knew he'd take care of himself. Times like this, though, it sucked.

She said, still all tabula rasa, “The woman who died, right?”

He'd have to explain. He walked toward her. “Yeah, but what you don't know is, they ordered me to 'play along with her infatuation.' Left to my own devices, that wouldn't have gone anywhere—I had no clue what I was doing—but orders were orders, and she did. Know what she was doing, I mean. So that went well, right up to the moment they ordered me to kill her.” He clenched his fists. 

“We're weapons, Max. We ruin lives. So you think I don't understand how you feel, what you go through, well, I do. If I can help, I want to. If you don't want my help, then—” He didn't finish. Because the logical end of that sentence was, “I'll get out of here and let you deal with it yourself,” and, well, hadn't he already proved to himself that wasn't going to happen?

“All right,” Max said. She turned away, hugging her elbows again, and her voice was a husk as she said, “I guess we can try.”

IV.  
Original Cindy listened, stanza and verse, to today's rendition of “the X-5 blues,” and then said she had a girlfriend she could stay with and beyond that, she don't want to hear nothing else about it. She packed a duffel and booked.

Leaving Alec to deal with Max.

Her heat was close now. The buttery scent of a horny female. He bet no one else ever noticed it, but it spoke on a level below the conscious, right to the primal part of him. A feature, not a bug. 

They talked ways and means while she still had enough of a grip on reality to weigh in on it, though he caught her staring at him more and more often, her eyes lingering on his shoulders, his hips. The invisible wires in his spine seemed to have gone metastatic, tiny hooks all through his skin, so he prickled when she moved. 

“Not—cuffs,” she said when he held them up. She squirmed.

“Well, you've already shot down duct tape and rope,” Alec said. “We're running out of options here.”

“Look, what about a combination?” she said, fast and jagged. “You need to control my joints. Elbows. Knees. If I have those, I can break out.”

The bondage associations were close. Max, tied in one of those intricate Japanese schemes, kneeling, wrists bound to ankles bound to shoulders bound to breasts. Yesterday, bondage didn't move his furniture. Today was a different story.

They experimented. He bit the inside of his mouth until it bled as he wound duct tape around her ankles, her knees, cuffed her taped wrists to the radiator. 

She struggled and then looked up at him through her lashes, sweat beaded on her brow. She nodded. “I think this'll work.”

“Can't say I'm looking forward to spoon-feeding you,” he said.

“Maybe I can get time off for good behavior.”

Her voice purred.

Guess it was time to test his bondage skills in the field.

V.  
The next three days were the worst of Alec's life.

Okay. That was over-dramatic. He'd had worst days, surely. Just not three of them in a row.

Max stayed cuffed to the radiator, but not for lack of trying. Whenever he left the room, she worked her bonds until the radiator pipes creaked. And as her heat went on, he had to leave the room a lot.

Having him around made her insane. She rubbed her thighs together, rode the seam of her jeans, and moaned, and shuddered, and gasped, and moaned again. She glared at him through the voluptuous waves of her sweaty hair and cursed him for a bastard and worse. Her promises ranged from sweet to filthy. She pleaded with him to free her feet, just her feet. 

He couldn't imagine what good having her feet free would do her, and he never found out, because he left them taped. She sawed her hips and cried.

The cat wore itself out every once in awhile and Max came back. He caught her in those dozy downslopes so he could take her to the bathroom, give her something to eat. She slept in his arms as he gently lowered her to the floor so he could reattach her cuffs to the radiator, only to wake a few minutes later.

Throughout the whole degrading, unlovely thing, he had an erection.

He hated it. Lust all knotted up with pity and self-loathing in his stomach, which ached with desire. He was unrelentingly hard and throbbing and he wanted to touch her, and the snake in him listened when she begged and bargained and went into detail about the things she would do, would let him do, if only he'd turn her loose. 

It was frustrating, and so, so very annoying, because he had a short attention span and the snake wouldn't let him look at, or think of, anything but her. Even lust got old eventually. 

“You can take care of yourself if you want,” Max said. He couldn't see her eyes through her hair but her husky voice was soft; she sounded sorry. “I promise I won't call you a pig.”

She drew in a shuddering breath. His cock twitched at the promise of release, and the snake wondered if she meant for him to do it where he was, where she could watch.

He took his own shuddering breath through a half-closed throat. “I won't, Max.” 

The cat took over then, and she talked awhile about how she wouldn't mind seeing it. The snake listened, but Alec tried to tune it out.

Three days like that.

At the end of the third, she looked up at him with embers still burning in the depths of her eyes, but the wildness was gone. 

“Welcome back,” he said hoarsely.

VI.  
She cried a little while he undid her bonds, and he pretended he didn't hear. He hadn't so much as copped a feel and she was crying. Well, he'd done his best. He'd followed mission parameters exactly. 

Later, after they'd both showered and she'd changed her clothes, she made tea and they sat at the table with the small lamp glowing between them. They didn't have much to say to each other. She was a little thinner, haggard, hollows under her eyes. 

She stared into her tea. “Thank you,” she said. 

He swallowed. “Did it help?” 

“I don't know,” she said. She made eye contact that flashed through him, throat to groin. Then back to the tea. If she wanted to read her future, she had the wrong setup. You could do that with loose leaves, but she had a bag in there.

He shook it off. Losing his mind. “Ask you tomorrow?”

“No...” She dipped her tea bag, pushed a wing of dark hair behind her ear. “It helped,” she said, her voice stronger. “I mean, I'm glad. Nobody bringing me motor oil or... or hanging around with pizza. But having you watch me go through that...”

Had she hit “you” a little harder than the rest of the sentence? If this were Manticore, he could consult a tape. Here, all he had to rely on was his squishy, truth-bending brain.

“Talk about embarassing.” She laughed a sad little laugh, wiped a dribble of tea off the side of her cup with her thumb, and sipped.

He wanted to ask if he'd made it worse for her, being around a male X5, but he didn't. “You don't have anything to be—”

“Skip it,” she said. “That whole freakshow, let's just forget about it, okay?”

He raised his mug and eyed her over its rim. “But what happens next March, Max?”

She looked away and didn't answer.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh, did I say this was going to be a diptych? I forgot: I can't write short fics anymore. So here's an epic crapload of set up and ship-tease.

I.  
Max bit her lips as she pedaled back to Jam Pony. Sector 3's police had quarantined a block rather than wade into what sounded like total gang warfare, forcing her to take a shortcut before Normal docked her for running slow. He always got extra-Normalish right around her heats; something about the pheromones she put out seemed to short his wires, and he took his confusion out on her. Must be tough, being most of the way through middle age and still not having a handle on your sexuality. 

Like she could really talk. Her only experiences came from the heats. They counted, because she remembered them, so they had to. But it wasn't like the songs and the story books. It wasn't about communication and union. It was just bodies banging together, doing their thing. 

Alec had gotten her through the peak of this one, but there was always two weeks of something like an extended hangover, like her body couldn't quite let go of the idea that it was baby-makin' time. She had control, but she was still too aware of her hips rolling, her groin flexing as she stood on the pedals to gain more speed. 

Yeah, sure, let's think about Alec, she thought sarcastically. That'll make a real change of pace from the last few days. 

It was her worst nightmare. She had him on the brain, and she couldn't shake him. She hoped this whole insane thing would evaporate like morning mist when her hormones settled, but until then, it was like her exposure to him had... _imprinted_ him on her. Like, her ovaries were shaking the fallopian tubes, chanting, “Those genes! Those genes! Yay!”

Which was just a weird image, especially since Max wasn't prone to flights of fancy. She cruised into Jam Pony's bay, hopped off the bike and hung it up. 

There was a knot of people standing in the center of the room, staring at something on the floor. It took a second for the significance to filter in, but when it did, she was there, shoving people aside so she could kneel by Alec's head.

“Sh-should we c-call an ambulance?” shy Sky stuttered. 

“No,” Max snapped. Softening as Sky blanched, she added, “He could never afford it.”

She threw her leg over Alec's thighs, settled her weight on his hips, held his head so he wouldn't batter it on the floor. A seizure. Her own were better—not gone, but better—since Dr. Shankar started her on extended release medicine, but Alec didn't have that luxury. This whole time, after all he'd done for her, and she'd never thought to ask how he dealt with them. 

Not her fault. He was just so... shrink-wrapped, like nothing stuck to him. She knew it to be a veneer and a lie, but he made it so easy to believe. 

And to forget how similar they really were.

Okay. Warm and tender feelings, right now? Was a “what the hell, brain?” moment, because Alec was still seizing, bucking underneath her. She wrapped her legs around his, restrained him without giving away her full strength. Thanks to Sketchy, half the riders at Jam Pony already believed in transgenics. She tried to make it look like she just knew what to do.

His eyes rolled back until only a slender crescent of green showed. The body writhing under hers was hard and long and lean. His teeth were locked, lips pulled back, his breath sawing, skin slick with sweat. Max gritted her teeth. For the sake of her sanity, this couldn't last much longer.

“Ride him, cowgirl!” Oaky shouted, and Original Cindy smacked him on the chest. 

In Alec's brain, electricity snapped and crackled, wildfire burning synapses, shorting circuits left and right. Seizures were exhausting. He'd be helpless for the rest of the day, and threats still hunted them.

Max made eye contact with OC. “Logan,” she said, and OC nodded and faded back, already pulling out her cell. 

II.  
Logan looked up from his scavenged computer rig and blinked.

“Hello, Max, Original Cindy,” he greeted them, Long Island Polite as always. He pushed himself back from the desk and turned the chair to face them. Even though he could walk again thanks to that transfusion of Joshua's transgenic blood, he still manipulated chairs as though they all had wheels. 

“So... what's the plan? He's gonna stay here? For how long?”

“Don't see why brother hasn't just moved in. Can't seem to keep his ass outta this place,” OC said. She had one of Alec's arms over her shoulders, but Max supported most of his dead weight as she moved him to the battered couch. 

This used to be Joshua's joint, which he'd shared with Alec whenever Alec was jammed up—which was all the damn time. When Joshua split, he'd let Logan move in, and he'd had to because his hack got traced by friggin' White, who'd then gone and shot up his, Logan's, apartment; and before all that, this house had belonged to Sandeman, the Father of Manticore.

Being here made Max's head hurt. 

Standing in a room with Logan on one side of her (and the neverending mutter of _leave some space, leave some space, leave some space_ —courtesy of Manticore, she carried a deadly retrovirus targeted to Logan's DNA) and Alec on the other side of her (with another neverending mutter of _those genes, those genes, those genes, yay!_ ) just made her head hurt worse.

She pinched the bridge of her nose. Original Cindy asked, “You aight, boo?”

“I'm fine,” she said. “To answer your question, Logan, no, he's not staying here, but he's weak and I need him able to defend himself before I haul his ass back to Terminal City.”

Her voice came out waspish, and she winced at its echoes. The color bled from Logan's face, though his expression didn't change, becoming something like a mask. 

They were locked in this bad pattern lately, where Logan's hope just made her so angry, because it just couldn't happen. Relationships were supposed to move forward, weren't they? But theirs always did this thing, where it was, but it wasn't. She gazed at him apologetically, saw the quirk of his mouth as he accepted her unspoken apology.

And there it was. Her whole life outside Manticore was about lies and miscommunication, but Logan? He saw through to the heart of her, and it wasn't some dippy “without trying” romantic nonsense, either. He saw through to the heart of her because he worked his own heart out to do it, and she had to respect that, even if she couldn't—for his own safety—return the favor.

She loved him. She couldn't love him. Her head pounded in 3/8ths time. 

She knelt to check on Alec. He was still groggy, post-ictal, but he opened his eyes and blinked at her, dragged a smile up from the cellar and pasted it on his pasty face. “You're s'posed to bring me chicken noodle soup,” he muttered. 

She punched him on his arm. Frothy spittle had dried white on his mouth, so she licked her thumb to clean it off. The soft flesh of his lower lip became glossy pink as she smoothed the wettened ball of her thumb over it.

“How you feeling?” she asked. 

“Gimme a few minutes and I'll show you.” He tipped her a burlesque wink. 

“Men,” OC drawled behind them both.

Max startled. For a moment, she'd forgotten about OC and Logan, and—oh God. 

She rotated to look at him, his stony expression like a slap to her face. He'd always been jealous of Alec. He was jealous of any able-bodied man, but it was so much worse with Alec, an X-5 like herself. And Alec, of course, couldn't resist needling him, even now, when she knew for a fact he felt like his blood had been replaced by battery acid.

She'd licked her thumb and washed his face—God, what was wrong with her? She hadn't even thought...! It was an action as instinctive as a cat grooming itself. More presents from her feline DNA? The hangover from her heat messing with her mind? Who the hell knew, but she was happy to blame all this on more weirdness from Manticore.

Logan didn't accept her unspoken apology this time. His lips thinned. He turned back to his computer. 

III.  
Logan drove them into Terminal City after nightfall. Max rode in the back with Alec, which would have been less awkward if OC hadn't bowed out and went home—Terminal City, with its oodles of biogenetically engineered bad bugs, creeped her out, and rightfully so. 

Max made Logan pull up on the outskirts, though he wanted to drive right up to the base's front door. 

“Sure he can make it?” Logan twisted around to ask, tipping his chin at Alec. 

“I can make it,” Alec said, lips tight, eyebrows lowered. 

“Guys,” Max said, getting in the middle of this before it escalated. “Thanks, Logan.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “You know, I can take you the rest of the way. No trouble.”

Max flashed him a look as she helped—more like booted—Alec out of the car. “I think exposing you to one deadly pathogen per day is my limit.”

“Wait, Max,” Logan said. He reached for her, but it was just a gesture; he knew as well as she did what would happen if he touched her. Welts came first, then the skyrocketing fever, then the delirium and the airway compromise. She flinched back anyway, and he grimaced and let his hand drop.

“While we have a minute,” he said.

“We always need more than a minute,” she muttered.

He sighed, acknowledging that truth. “You and Alec... what's there?” 

“My fist in his face, mostly,” she said. 

“Really? Because it looked more like a tender caress in his face, from where I was sitting. But, you know, the lighting's been bad in that room ever since Joshua painted over the windows.”

Max looked down at the floorboards. “Logan—”

“Don't say it.”

“You ask to talk to me and then you don't want to hear what I have to say?” she flared. He looked away. “Every time we have a scare, we have this talk. And I say, 'I can't do this,' and you say, 'There's a cure out there somewhere,' and we kick the can down the road. Which works... until I touch you again, or you touch me.”

He swallowed audibly. “If it's that you want to be with Alec—”

“God, why are you so hung up on Alec all the sudden?” She glanced out the window to where Alec waited by the curb, his hands fisted in the pockets of his battered leather coat. He shouldn't be out in the open like that; according to their training, everywhere but Terminal City was hostile territory. He should seek cover, but instead he waited. 

“The way you look at him,” Logan said. “And... I've been tracking your heats.” 

She gaped at him.

He continued implacably, “Your heat was two weeks ago. I couldn't get ahold of you, and I couldn't get ahold of Original Cindy, and I couldn't get ahold of Alec.”

“There's been a lot going on.”

“Why lie?” Logan turned back around. “I just told you I did the math, Max.”

“For your information, you ungrateful ass, I basically locked myself in a box that week. It was a total nightmare, and I did it to keep from hurting you, and _you're welcome._ ” 

She opened the car door and ditched out.

IV.  
They took the sewer, because Alec was too wobbly to manage the rooftops. Terminal City, home of the scary, scary pathogens, had had its sewers disconnected from the city proper by virtue of having the water turned off and the passages bricked over. The transgenics had made short work of the blockades, so the sewers in this sector were dry, practically odorless, freeways. 

They walked down the center of the channel so they could stand up straight, their night vision easily handling the darkness. They navigated by counting their steps. One hundred thirty two strides, turn right. Four hundred eight, another right. Like that. 

Max brooded over Logan as Alec padded alongside her. She glanced at him every once in awhile, but she was distracted; it was just to make sure he was moving well, a commander checking her lieutenant. 

So it surprised her when he said, “Max, can we take five?”

“Yeah,” she said, and turned, instantly contrite, to help him sit down on the edge of the channel, but he waved her off.

“I'm fine,” he said. “Just tired.”

She settled down beside him. “I know,” she said. “Was that a bad one for you?”

He shook his head, then stared into space. “They come in cycles. Start pretty mild, ramp up over time. That was a mild one. The strong ones? Down for days.” He grimaced. “And we have a war coming.”

“Don't you take tryptophan?”

He nodded, but then his lips tightened again. She wished she understood what those flashes of pain on his face meant. “I was,” he said. “Then White tagged it as a marker for X5's. Now it's hard to find a trustworthy source. I have an easier time scoring E than some goddamned amino acid, how's that for ironic?” He laughed, but it was bitter.

“There's other medicine,” she said. “I'll get it for you. Even if I can't... the war will go on without you.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, and he swallowed; she heard it, saw his throat work in the gloom. “That's precisely what I don't want.”

Something powerful thrummed in his voice, and it vibrated deep inside her, synchronizing with her own instinct. War, what she was trained and bred for, was coming—not just any war, but one she could believe in. A war for freedom, for self-determination. If she missed it, she'd regret it the rest of her life. This one thing, he didn't have to explain. She understood completely.

He looked at her, and his voice was once again that too-cool-for-school drawl as he said, “So, Logan finally broke out his abacus, huh? I was wondering when he'd get around to it.”

“That's none of your business,” she said, springing to her feet, their warrior bond shattered. 

“Can't blame the man for being a little spun,” he said. He stood up, stretched, his tendons and ligaments creaking over muscle and bone. Every little sound was magnified in this sewer; she could practically hear him blink. “I mean, you did give me a post-office kiss back there.”

“I don't know what on Earth possessed me,” she snapped.

He shrugged, and fell in step beside her again as they walked down the sewer passage. “You were curious, that's all,” he said. 

“Excuse me?”

He stopped, so she did too. He stared down at her. She could make out his eye whites, the green irises, pupils fully dilated to take in whatever scant starlight filtered down through the sewer grates. They really needed to get some electric wiring strung up down here in case they ever wanted this system for a retreat, Max thought.

That was her last thought before Alec stepped into her space, the heat of his body washing over her like sunshine from behind a cloud, his scent—a thousand chemical messages from his body to hers, saying things like _healthy_ , and _strong_ , and _wanting you_ —overpowering reason and good sense. 

She tipped her face up to his, because, damn it, he wasn't wrong. She _was_ curious. Her love for Logan was a heady, intellectual attachment: he was good, a hero, and he'd given her life a purpose beyond scrabbling for money and getting hammered at Crash. She enjoyed dissecting his mind, which was, in many ways, more agile and well-informed than her own. He was handsome, too, but that'd always been beside the point. With his paralysis, any sensuality seemed somehow rude, like it would just remind him of what he couldn't have.

Not the case here. No heady, intellectual attachment. Just her ovaries holding a prison riot and her blood joining in the fun. It was heat, all chemical and irrational, but her heats were always exercises in frustration, because she was a revved-up transgenic trying to get her freak on with fragile human men who, on a chemical level, flat grossed her out, and here was someone she bet wouldn't disappoint. But it would just be the same, tired old thing: bodies banging together, even if those bodies were elite.

Alec swayed in. The best part was, he looked as torn and agonized as she felt.

She tasted his breath; she swallowed. 

“I wonder if this is just the way it is with two X5's,” he muttered. 

She recognized the tactic: distract; disengage. They were almost talking into each other's mouths, so if there was going to be some last-ditch effort at heading this off, it'd better happen fast. Then the import of what he'd said hit her and she, shocked, said out loud, “Wait. You've never been with another X5?”

He spun away laughing, doubled over and braced his palms on his thighs, staring at her, still laughing. 

“Sometimes, Max, I just gotta stand stock still and _marvel_ at the self-absorption, you know?” He wiped his eyes and straightened up. “D'you think Manticore was one big cuddle party? Up until you destroyed the embryo stocks, we couldn't even _touch_ another soldier without a reason, male or female.”

“Okay, okay,” she said. She paced away as sanity reasserted itself, horror hard on its heels. “Obviously my heat's still screwing with my head, so let's just take that as a given. Revise the mission parameters. This thing'll go away on its own in a few more days, so all we have to do is... be soldiers. Like at Manticore. Arm's length, maintain intervals. Right?”

She heard the pleading note in her own voice, because if she had to feel like this, her only hope was that it would be temporary.

“Right,” Alec said. “Cos, don't get me wrong, you are hot, Maxie, but I do not want to get in the middle of you and Logan's whole thing. Too exhausting.”

“Damn right,” she said. “Totally confusing. No need to add more complication.”

“You have a year of history with the man. And! He's crazy about you. Or, at the minimum, he's _acting_ crazy _because_ of you: Same thing.”

“We're grown... transgenics,” Max said. “We can handle this like mature... transgenics.”

They marched back to Terminal City like two good soldiers from Manticore would do, single file, an arm's length between them.


	3. Chapter 3

I.  
“Mole!” Alec hailed the supply master as he entered the base. “Need an update on that water project.”

“Yeah, I bet.” Mole chewed the end of his evil-smelling cigar as he looked Alec over head to toe. “What'd you get into today?”

Alec dropped the plastic bag that contained his coat on a nearby chair. No way was he risking getting this gunge on that leather, scarred and battered though it may be; that coat was perfectly broken in. 

“So, you remember Max's bright idea about using the sewers to exit the city? Yeah, no.”

“Hell, I coulda told her that.”

Alec grinned up at him as he worked the sodden laces of his boots. “We _all_ told her that, Mole. She was sure if we just got down and dirty, we'd find a way. And there is... for anyone with gills. So how about that update, before I stink up the joint?”

“You mean, any more than you already do?” It was no secret Mole chain-smoked the foulest cigars he could get ahold of to drown out the smells of the other transgenics, particularly the X-series, who, he claimed, smelled like wet dog if the reason that dog was wet was because it was dead, rotting, and submerged in a swamp. Mole, more lizard than anything else, could taste those smells, and he preferred the cigars. “Well, LT, we've been laying pipe from neighboring sectors all week, and we got one up and runnin' today. The other four are supposed to come online in the next four days, one per, as I can free up the manpower. It's the bats' baby, and you know how they are; the whole damn flock has to go one to the other.”

“Is it a flock of bats or something else?” Alec asked as they mounted the stairs.

“Hell if I know—”

“Excuse you.” 

Alec stopped before he tripped over Max, who'd stepped out of a doorway right into his path. She'd piled her wet hair on her head, wavy loose tendrils clinging to her damp cheeks and neck. He spun on his heel to drill an accusatory glare into Mole, who flashed his palms at him and shrugged. 

“LT, she's the commander, she gets first shower. Them's regs.”

“Yes, I am the commander, and I did have the first shower, and those are regs,” Max said, and beamed at him. She was in a good mood, the bitch, as well she should be, spanking clean and pink with scrubbing. “But it's free now for what is—obviously—an emergency. Go. Go!”

Mole began to repeat his report from the top as Alec walked into the room Max had just stepped out of, following the scent of water and flushed skin through a warren of little rooms and flimsy doors.

It was the first time he'd been within arm's reach of her since that moment down in the sewers, two weeks ago. If they hadn't been so damn busy, they might have touched base long enough for Max to rescind that order, but instead, they'd been translating mystic runes, supplying the transgenics at Terminal City, and fighting a guerrilla war.

Mystic runes. Max had started breaking out with them like a bad rash. Joshua and Logan were the heads of the committee designated to translate them, mostly because Joshua was the only other being Logan could stand to have in the room when Max got naked so they could copy the symbols. Alec wasn't gonna be the one to break it to him that Joshua might be a dog-boy, but he wasn't dead.

He finally found the shower, a barracks shower, actually, heads projecting out with no curtains or anything. Efficient for hosing down the troops, but the lack of cover sent a shiver of anxiety up his spine as he dropped his filthy clothes beneath a showerhead to soak. 

He picked a shower in the corner so he could see the whole room. Green tile, grout that had once been white and was now greenish-black with mildew: good old Seattle. Max had left a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo behind, both so generic Alec felt no compunction about using them. He poured a little shampoo on his clothes, too, because it couldn't hurt.

The bar of soap glided over his skin, slick and smooth like wet hands. This soap had touched Max this way. Good God, he must be hard up; Terminal City was thick with X-series, fine, toned honeys with flirty eyes, but there'd literally been no time. Days, he ran missions: rescue, sabotage, or supply; nights, he got debriefed, and then met with the rest of the command staff to form objectives for the next day. 

Max kept a table between them, passed him papers and maps to read instead of sharing. She kept Logan at the same distance. She was way too good at keeping space between herself and things she wanted.

That aside, things were still tough. Alec had been trained to be an assassin, not a leader, but now he had to command anywhere up to a dozen men, depending on the mission. He'd had to get up to speed on each breed's specific capabilities, and then he'd had to discover the top performers in each specialty so he could handpick the best platoon to complete the objective. His command style was big on autonomy; he gave broad orders and asked his men to fill in the details, so a dummy in the mix could shaft him good. 

He didn't need much sleep, but others did, and there were no handbooks, no Great Manual of Manticore to rely on. He'd had to catch and interview people, then use his eidetic memory during the night to transcribe what he'd learned. Good thing he had the gift of gab; a lot of the troops were tough to get information from, simply because they'd never mastered the art of stringing a sentence together. He was proud of his work. There wasn't a Great Manual of Manticore yet, but he was writing one.

And the seizures. 

Max couldn't get him the medicine. Dr. Shankar was under pressure to report new prescriptions to the government, or something; bored with the story of failure, Alec had tuned out Max's explanation, but not her eyes, huge and shining dark with anxiety.

“Oh, that,” he'd said, looking up from the pistol he was cleaning to smile at her. “Forgot all about it, to be honest, Maxie. Startin' to think that Jam Pony seizure was just my Shining coming on.”

“The hell you talkin' about?” she'd snorted, half-amused, half-annoyed by his absurdity.

He swung his shoulders towards her and splayed his hands. “It was a one-off. A fluke. A harbinger of things to come. I'm fine. Hey, speaking of meds, one of the X4s just came in's got an infected foot...”

The diversion worked. There _was_ an X4 with an infected foot he'd needed to speak to Max about, so the conversation wasn't a complete tissue of lies. 

The tryptophan, when he could get it, took the edge off, kept the seizures from going Godzilla Stomp, and anyway, he felt them coming on; he tasted peaches, saw colors bloom around the edges of things. The only close call so far was when the Led Zep lightshow had started during a briefing: he'd had to make some lame excuse and go lock himself in a closet. As his head hammered the back wall, he heard Max calling his name... but there was always so much construction racket around the base, she missed the drumming. Next morning, she dressed him down for being hungover and insisted he take a couple of bruisers along on the day's mission to cover for his sick, slow ass. 

The soap slid over his flanks, his lower back, his thighs.

The seizures worried him, but he refused to miss this war, especially now that he saw how necessary he was. Every X5 had been drilled on what to do if a seizure during a mission rendered them unable to command, but he didn't like to think about that. 

He let his soapy hand drift down and thought about more pleasant things instead. 

II.  
Max smiled at him across the conference table.

“Now that I'm all squeaky clean, the smell of the rest of you mothers is makin' me crave one of Mole's cigars.” She smiled and bumped hips with Joshua, wrapped her arm around his waist and snuggled in. Logan looked up through his lashes without raising his head from the prospectus in front of him, but he neither frowned nor said anything. 

“Max and Alec smell like fake flowers,” Joshua said, vague disapproval in his voice, and then Logan frowned, not liking that Conjunction Junction. 

“Yeah, and the rest of you are gonna be smelling the same way by tomorrow,” Alec said. 

“You too, Big Fella,” Max said, and Joshua howled sadly at the ceiling.

“Won't do you no good without some new socks and underwear, least not til we get a laundry detail going,” Mole said.

“Is that really a priority?” Logan glanced up. “Creature comforts are worth thinking about, but maybe not when it's going on to midnight.”

“Some of us need our beauty sleep,” Max said, smiling at him.

“Well, we can't all have shark DNA,” Logan replied.

“We should appoint a Quartermaster,” Alec said. They both looked at him, which was what he'd wanted. “We got Nomlies and lower X-series who'd been housekeepers at Manticore. X3-212, civ name Benton, used to manage that department. I'll talk to him tomorrow morning and set it up.”

“Hey, lookit Alec, coming through in the pinch,” Max said.

“Now, how about a real cook?” Mole asked. “Gal we got now thinks the world begins and ends with potatoes.”

“Well, that'd be because of the depot of dehydrated potato flakes we found, remember? I doubt anyone could do better,” Logan said. 

“R5-338,” Alec said.

“Do you know everybody in this camp?” Now Max let go of Joshua entirely to put both her hands on the table and lean over it, staring at him, still smiling. Alec smiled back. It was rare to see her so impressed, and he let himself bask in the dual satisfaction of being useful to his commander and seeing that expression on Max's usually disgruntled face. 

“Just about,” he said. “Anyway, I'll talk to her, too.”

“Good. Glad that's settled,” Logan said. “Now can we get on with the business of tonight's briefing? Please?”

“Logan pack for three day getaway,” Joshua said.

Alec glanced back over at him. Yeah, now that the dog mentioned it, Logan looked like shit. Pale, his usual stubble well on its way to becoming a beard, huge purply-green half-circles under his eyes. 

“You all right?” he asked, and then glanced at Max, because by rights, that should have been her question. But she was suddenly extremely interested by something on the floor, and that told him everything he needed to know.

Something was wrong with Logan. Max knew and was covering for him. 

Stupid.

He clenched his jaw. He couldn't really take her to task about it, because he was concealing something every bit as bad, but Logan, as much as Alec hated to admit it, was important to this operation. He was not only translating the mysterious runes that tattooed Max's whole body, but he was also starting a closed-circuit TV network for Terminal City so the leadership could communicate with the troops more efficiently. Not only that, his comfort and happiness was essential to Max's ability to lead.

No doubt they were having impassioned conversations in private about how to resolve this latest health crisis. At any rate, it couldn't be Alec's problem until Max made it his problem. Mentally, he shrugged and shelved the issue. 

III.  
Max let him hang around Terminal City the next day instead of saddling him with a mission. “Your mission today is getting those coffee stains out my favorite tank top,” is how she'd put it. 

It took him most of the morning to hunt up the two transgenics he needed. Terminal City was a big place, thirty square miles. A lot of new faces. The bats, in particular, were—flocking, or whatever they did. That was going to bother him forever, apparently.

Both Benton and R5-338—who'd earned the civ name of Captain since last they spoke, though she was definitely female, despite being covered in tabby-cat fur—were happy to use their skillsets from Manticore for Terminal City's cause. Better yet, they'd naturally clustered with others from their divisions, so it was pretty much like, find Benton, find the housekeepers. Find Captain, find the kitchen staff. Couldn't be easier.

And since that _did_ turn out to be so simple, Alec permitted himself to divert off-base for an hour to liberate a bottle of whiskey, even though Max would have a red-fire-spitting-fit if she knew. He lived a military life in deed if not in word; in almost every way that mattered, he was the soldier Manticore had wanted. Going walkabout every once in awhile kept the division clear: he was still free. This wasn't Manticore. And it was nice to walk amongst people who didn't do a double take when they recognized him or abort salutes with embarrassed smiles. 

He'd commandeered a small apartment for his own personal use. He spread out on his sofa with his bottle on his chest, luxuriating in the quiet. He could hear the camp through his open windows—transgenics laughing, talking, arguing, bitching; pounding hammers, whirring power tools—but no one talked to him. No one knew where he was. It was relaxing. As extroverted as he was, every once in awhile, a man wanted to be alone. 

So when the knock came on his door, he groaned. The bottle was still mostly full, and it sloshed with a sound a little like wind in the eaves when he set it on the floor. Outside, the day had turned gray, and a cold breeze rattled the blinds.

“Freezing in here,” Max said as soon as he opened the door. She gripped her elbows and shivered. “This is where you live?” She ducked beneath his arm as he waved his free hand fatalisticallly and muttered, “Hiya, Max. C'mon in. Welcome.”

The apartment didn't have power. Really, it wasn't even an apartment; it was a hideout, and he resented seeing her here.

She stood in the center of the living room. “So, what's the dealio with this bitch?” she asked, voice bright with false cheer. “You come here, play guitar, think about eternity?”

“Mostly, I just drink. Alone,” Alec said.

She ignored that, roaming around the room, poking her nose into the corners. There wasn't a lot to see. The sofa. A bed. Places to lay down. 

“You bring the honeys back here? Must impress the hell out of them,” she joked. 

“Maybe I would, if you left me any time. Would you like to hear my report?”

“No.” She didn't look at him. “This isn't business.”

So then what was it? Alec knew better than to ask. He sat back on the sofa and grabbed the whiskey. She'd leave when she got bored, or she'd open her mouth and spill it. If it wasn't about Logan, he'd chug the remainder of this bottle.

“How'd he look to you?”

Well, good to know he wouldn't be puking any time soon. He took a swig. 

“Like hell,” he said. “Blood's not holding, is it?”

Logan had been transfused with transgenic blood three times now. Each time, the transfusion held for a short while, and then the benefits unravelled. Logan bobbed up and down from his wheelchair like a cork held underwater. 

“He'd hoped... Joshua's blood seemed to last so much longer,” Max said. She glanced over her shoulder at him from where she stood at the window, her body an exaggerated hourglass silhouette against the watery gray pane. “He's taking it hard.” She looked back out the window again.

And, because he couldn't stop himself, Alec swung himself off the sofa again and went to her. The light glided over her long, slender throat, picking out the corrugations of her trachea. His Manticore training whispered how easy it would be to crush that cartilage. It made her look vulnerable, though of course she was far from that. 

“Is this all right?” he asked, swigging from the bottle again.

She took it from him and held it up, took down two swallows and handed it back. He turned away to hide what her pornstar lips wrapped around the neck had done to him. It'd go away soon enough. 

“What do you mean?” she asked, dark eyes flicking up and down his body; he felt her gaze.

“Down in the sewer? You gave me an order? Stay one arm's length away from you? Ringin' a bell?” He reached out. He could cup her shoulder if he wanted, but he didn't touch her. Her body heat warmed his palm. “This is a little less than that.”

“That wasn't meant to be carved in stone. I just—needed a little help doing the sane thing.” She shrugged uncomfortably, not looking at him.

He took a drink. 

“So, what's your plan?” he asked, lips twisting as he swallowed the bitter liquor. “You two always have a plan.”

“He needs more blood,” Max said faintly.

“Needs it? Or wants it? Because, seems to me, he'd be better off if he just accepted that chair. It's got to be better than...”

“Better than what? Better than hope?” The anger in Max's voice told him this troubled her, too. She snatched the bottle back from him. “You know what, though? I don't even wanna talk about this! It's all we talk about.” She stared at him. “I want to think about something else.”

“No, you don't,” Alec said. He waited until she had her drink and then took the bottle. His fingers touched hers, fever warm. She filled the apartment with her sound and her smell and her life. He'd wanted silence, and he still resented her coming here, dropping her problems on his lap, but he'd never turn her away.

“I don't? Funny, cos I think I just said I did,” she said, with a twist of her head.

“No. You want me to give you arguments you can use to get him to accept his circumstances, because the alternative is...” He grimaced, imagining it... “kinda gross.”

“It's medicine,” Max said, and he heard Logan behind her words. “Lots of people have to get infusions to make it. You and me and the other X5s, we depend on meds, if we don't wanna shake, rattle, and roll out the door.”

Alec shrugged. “If it makes sense to you, order Joshua to donate. Or maybe one of those vampire types. You've got a thousand transgenics at your disposal. I'm sure you could find a volunteer if you don't wanna make it an order.”

She put her palm against the cold window glass. Her nipples hardened as a breeze pressed the thin fabric of her shirt against her stomach. He swallowed against a sudden dryness in his throat. 

“Doesn't this constant drama ever get old, Max? This whole 'we can touch, until we can't? He can stand and get a hard-on, except nope?'”

“You shut up,” she said through bared, gritted teeth.

“And you've never even seen him,” Alec continued, merciless. “Was he good to you before the virus, Max? What's it like when he can walk, and what's it like when he loses it? Is that why you came here, to cry on on my shoulder? Because it's your choice, and you're making it, and I don't care.”

“Yeah, I know you don't care,” she said, brittle. “You don't care about anything but yourself.”

On one level, that was fair, and it hurt to hear the truth. On another level, Alec knew she had him wrong, and that hurt, too. He didn't say anything to defend himself. He stared out the window at clouds piled bruise-purple and slate. It was going to storm.

“I ever tell you I hate the rain?” she muttered.

He swigged the whiskey. Cat DNA; he wasn't nuts about getting wet when it wasn't his idea, either.

She shyly touched his hip. Her arm wrapped around his lower back, and she pressed herself to his side. He didn't stop her, didn't move. Hell, didn't breathe. He didn't know what to do. If he startled her, brought her back to her right mind, she might spring away. The side of her breast, soft and warm against his ribs.

“Alec,” she said, her eyes glowing in the weird, pale storm light, “it's okay, you know. To care about yourself.”

His heart slammed against his sternum as his eyes skittered down, took in the angles of her face changed to bone china by the colorless light, the shine on her mouth, and then back up to the window and the lightning flickering in the swiftly-racing clouds. Only the whiskey, amber, had any color. He swallowed it, a sword of fire, and then held it up for Max to drink. The sight of her, suckling from the bottle he held as he metered out what she could have, whiskey spilling from the corner of her mouth when she didn't swallow fast enough, hardened him with painful swiftness.

“You know,” he said, his voice carefully careless, “you'll have your way, if you want it. I got no defense when it comes to you. But here's what bothers me: you want it to be my fault. You want me to be the asshole who comes between you and Logan. Max?”

She looked up at him. Her lips were trembling. Light caught in the tears in her eyes pierced their black depths with stars. 

She made his damn stomach hurt like hell. His balls ached fiercely. His blood banged his skin and through its pounding, he heard the skip and skitter of her broken heart beating.

“You know, Max, if not for the war, this would have worked.” He sighed and disengaged from her. Put the arm's length between them again. 

“Logan has his job to do,” he said, hurting her and helpless to stop. “I'm not going to be the one to break him, and deception _will_ break him. He might not be a warrior, but he still has to function.” 

He looked down at the bottle, snorted. “Manticore did too goddamn good a job on me.”

And then he pivoted and threw it against the wall so it exploded like a bomb.


	4. Chapter 4

I.  
The war came home to Terminal City last night. A mixed platoon of X5s and X6s came back from a supply mission with three casualties, one serious, and two boys dead.

Max sat beside the girl's bed, her head in her hands. She heard his tread, smelled his scent. Without looking away from the girl's bloodstained body, she said, “It's Ralph. I sent her along to see if she could maybe boost a van for us. Now she's dying.”

She didn't waste breath talking about her guilt or her culpability. She was the commander. It was her job to carry that weight. And, at any rate, he already knew.

He stopped behind her, an arm's length away. She felt him there.

“Alec.”

Even over the panting of Ralph's ventilator, she heard his breathing, quick and steady. His heart, too: quick and steady. 

“The objective is what matters to you, right?” Her voice was metallic, Ben's words in her mouth. 

He cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said.

“Well, I'm about fifteen seconds away from blue screen and crash.”

“What can I do?” 

“You know,” she said. 

“Yeah,” he said, and sighed. “Guess I do.”

He knelt beside her, put his arm around her shoulder. She reached up and touched his fingers where they draped over her bicep. Her peripheral vision was enhanced, same as everything else, and she could see him perfectly well. He, too, was transfixed by the dying teenage soldier in the cot, his green eyes wide, staring, his mouth hard. 

Whoever shot Ralph hadn't fucked around. Shotgun blast to the stomach, close range. The 6 series had flexible clotting factors, and that was all that had saved Ralph, though not for long. Her lumbar spine and the greater part of her intestines were gone; the colostomy bag they'd rigged hung there, slowly filling with blood. They couldn't repair her shattered aorta, but with the help of her own clotting factors, they could slow its catastrophic bleeding. Blood seeping from between her stitches saturated the sheets. Ralph: so named because she vomited at the sight of blood. It was a good thing she was unconscious on a ventilator. 

“She'll never puke again,” Alec said. It wasn't meant to be funny, though Max guessed she could read it that way, if she squinted; his lost tone stripped the humor from his words. “How did it happen?”

“Does it matter?” Max asked bitterly. “The enemy tried a tactic, and it worked. They won. We lost.”

Alec was silent.

She petted his fingers, then hooked her own through them, clinging to his hand. She was being selfish. What he'd told her in his apartment? Was the truth. But sometimes everything seemed sick or dying or miserable. Times like that, Alec became the warm center the life of this world crowded around. If she needed that, then so what? She was responsible for, as of the last census, nearly two thousand lives. Seemed to her that gave her license for all kinds of bad behavior. 

Touch, that most dangerous of the senses, but this was comfort, and that was all. He had a patch of rough skin on the side of one his fingers, calluses from handling guns at the bases, scars on his knuckles. She traced the textures.

“You gonna stay here with her?” he asked. He meant until the end. 

“Yeah. I'm going to turn that off,” she said, meaning the ventilator, “and then... I'll wait.”

He reached up and touched their linked hands, silently promising he'd stay, too.

Without letting go of him, Max stretched until she felt the smooth plastic of the ventilator's power switch beneath her fingertips. It glowed orange, until, after a quiet click, it didn't. And then the room was silent.

Alec's fingers tightened convulsively on hers. “Go to the good place, soldier,” he said.

II.  
She wasn't crying.

She walked back to the rooms she shared with Logan, each with their own careful space. Logan had, at first, tried to split his time between Terminal City and Joshua's house, but it soon became obvious that when you're working sixteen hour days, a commute on top was unreasonable. Another argument for piping in more transgenic blood: protection against the biohazards that were supposed to saturate the City, though Max was beginning to think that'd been exaggerated. After all, Logan hadn't fallen ill from any nasty germs, just the ongoing repercussions of the bullet that'd severed his spine two years ago.

She passed a television set. The anchor had just wrapped up the daily report on “the transgenic crisis,” and as she continued down the hall, she heard, “Local emergency rooms are operating past capacity as hundreds of patients seek treatment for a mysterious illness. Doctors state they don't know what's causing the illness and, as yet, there's no effective treatment. They urge anyone displaying the following symptoms to please stay home until the method of transmission can be determined...”

On some level, she knew that was important, but she filed it away. She'd had enough for one day. One of her lieutenants, Alec maybe, would prepare a report she'd read and react to. Tomorrow.

She slipped inside her room and startled at a shape standing in the center—turned on the light—

“Logan!”

He smiled brilliantly and strode across the room to stand in front of her. Even though he moved stiffly, still reacquainting himself with his balance, his sheer joy in walking made every step seem like part of a dance.

They'd danced once, to Sibelius. 

“You got more blood,” she said softly.

“Well, you could sound happier about it,” he said. 

“You didn't hear?” 

“Hear what?” 

“Amberry's mission went wrong,” she said. “Two injuries. Three deaths. Two in the field, and Ralph... just a few minutes ago.”

“Aw, Max, I'm sorry,” Logan whispered. “What happened?”

“Amberry thinks they might have a satellite on us now,” Max said. She hadn't shared that with Alec, because she knew he'd draw the same conclusion she had: if they were training satellites on them, bombs couldn't be far behind. The only reason they hadn't already done it—every transgenic in the metro area had to be here by now—had to be their fear of spreading TC's pathogens, in the form of fallout, across Seattle. Military geeks were probably hard at work right now, calculating the wind factors, the weather patterns, that'd minimize the collateral damage. Once they got their equations balanced, the missiles would come.

Again, that was a problem for tomorrow.

Blue screen and crash. 

The fact that Logan was standing now meant he'd probably transfused himself two, three days ago. He'd been keeping secrets from her, but that was the least of her problems.

“Where'd you get the blood?” she asked, turning away from him to go to the dresser. Logan had lit candles whose flames shivered as she passed them.

“Joshua,” he said. “I asked; he said yes.” Seeing the way she stiffened, Logan's voice got louder. “Every time I get transfused, the effects last longer. If it doesn't stick this time, maybe the next. Even if I only need it a couple of times a year...”

He pulled her away from the dresser, which she'd opened for a night shirt, with a gloved hand on her arm. “C'mon, Max,” he said, cupping her cheek. “It beats dying of a damn pressure ulcer.”

She leaned into the pressure of his palm, but she looked down when he tried to catch her eyes. He smelled like rubber and talcum powder. The latex glove was slightly tacky, clinging to her skin.

“Cos being addicted to transgenic blood is such a good trade,” she muttered.

He rolled his eyes. “Those drug addicts that've got you so spun were drinking a vampire's blood, Max. Entirely different. I can pretty much guarantee I'm not stoned. I'm just happy to be standing in front of you, a whole man, at last.”

But Logan was wrong. The euphoria he felt? Part of it was having his legs back, sure, but part of it was Manticore, too. The sense of buoyancy ebbed even as the blood's regenerative effects did, deepening his depression when he inevitably wound up back in that chair. 

His suicidal lows, she could handle, but Manticore's continual manipulation of her love life? That just made her ill.

Logan dipped his head, exerted gentle pressure on her chin, until she finally raised her face to his. He glowed down at her. 

“This time? I'm not gonna waste it,” he said, staring into her eyes, drinking her in. “I know there's things you want. Things you need. I want those things, too.”

The gap between their moods rendered this moment grotesque. Max played her only card as she tried to gently disengage. “The virus.”

He whiffled a laugh through his patrician nose. “Yeah, about that. So, you know the partial translation of your runes reads 'the good that cures all evil.'” He ran his gloved thumb over her lower lip, continually urging her to look at him with gentle upward pressure on her chin. “We got a little more of it translated, Joshua and I, and it looks like a biochemical equation. A recipe for a cure, Max... a panacea. The cure for everything. A miracle.”

He frowned when this didn't get much of a reaction out of her. 

Okay, so now her freaky skin might hold the cure for everything. So what? They'd still need a biochemical plant to make it a reality. She already had the troops rehabbing the most likely of TC's many defunct plants, but realistically? It could take years to get it up and running. And if missiles were coming...

She was tired of false hope. She stepped away from his touch. 

Logan's lips thinned with a combination of anger and dismay. His hand dropped to his side.

“Max,” he pleaded. “Since when did fear run your life?” 

“Since I grew up and had two thousand kids,” Max said.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yup, still writing this thing. Haven't slept. Ever read "Fillerbunny?" Same deal.

I.  
Alec stood on Grim's shoulders to peer through the sewer grate. The street was deserted except for fast-food wrappers, old newspapers, and the saucer-shaped shadows of hover drones drifting overhead. 

Alec whistled. “Jesus,” he said. “Bad news, people: we weren't picked for the Rapture after all.”

He climbed down Grim as though he were a tree, Grim's protuberant scales making excellent footholds. The big transgenic didn't seem to mind, though it was obvious “expressiveness” hadn't been a priority when they were designing him. Alec was still reassured when Grim returned his thumb's-up as he pulled his waders back on. He didn't want the big guy to think he was objectifying him or anything. 

“So!” He slapped his hands together. “Guess we won't be moving around on the streets. Jasper, gimme a route to the nearest hospital we can reach through these tunnels.”

Jasper was the collective name of the hive of X7s Alec had picked for this mission. The Jasper with their group turned towards the end of the tunnel and twittered to his hive, a sound that fluttered just at the edge of Alec's ability to hear, though Alice and Carol, twin bats, both winced and folded the leaves of their ears.

Alec had sent the hive into the sewers to the limit of their sending range to create a living map by which he could navigate. Since a Jasper who fell out of contact became little more than a paperweight made of meat, that was where the bats came in: they could detect a Jasper's “down time” twittering. 

So far, all the Jaspers were still checking in. Even though they had no sense of individual self, Alec had taken a careful headcount before he sent them off, and he intended to take another at each stage of the mission. The thought of one of those black-eyed, child-sized worker bees standing at a junction until he starved to death? Not appealing.

Max had sent them out to investigate the “mysterious illness.” She wanted to know the symptoms, the spread, how fatal it was, how long it took to kill.... To that end, once they reached a hospital, Alec and Syl would enter, posing as patients, and work their way to the treatment areas. Syl would then improvise a disguise and pose as a doctor or a nurse while Alec mined information from a computer. 

These sewers were not the dry, tame thoroughfares of home, and Alec winced as soft wads of shit bounced off the rubber of his waders, leaving smears and streaks behind.

It was unpleasant, and worse: it was boring. There were only so many times he could admire the moldings and then be grossed out by the mold. Since Jasper was still wittering away alongside Syl on point, with Alice and Carol in the middle and Grim bringing up the rear, Alec felt free to let his mind wander back to Max.

It wasn't a long trip. She was always close. 

They sat there, in the dark, listening to Ralph die. She held his hand because it comforted her, and he held hers, because it comforted him. 

Ralph was just a kid. More than that, she was what Manticore used to call a “flunky:” mediocre but charming, light-hearted. The sort of student who, after below-averaging all her studies in martial arts, got diverted to some soft science and shrugged at for the remainder of her military career. But those were the soldiers who were the most beloved, for some reason—perhaps because they didn't make anybody jealous.

Max only broke her hold to take the tube out of Ralph's mouth after she turned off the vent, and he remembered the way she peeled off the gloves—violently, snapping them into the trash, as though they were unbearable. Her palm when she took his hand again was floury with powder. And then they sat there just as they were before, listening to Ralph's breathing stumble and trip, until it stopped and didn't start again.

The intensity of the way he felt when she'd asked him to comfort her unsettled him. That was it. That was why his mind teased at this memory and wouldn't let it go. 

She'd asked for comfort in his apartment, and that was one thing. That was Max trying to find the most efficient way out of a trap, and it was just the way her mind worked. His time in Psy-Ops had taught him more than he'd wanted to know about the psychology of the Niners, and even after sifting out all of Manticore's self-serving oorah bullshit, the fact remained: they were quitters. When a situation got thorny, their first instinct was flight. Max had changed since the days of her escape, but when her back was to the wall, as it was that day, her first thought would always be “swift escape.”

He'd been honest when he'd told her that if not for the war effort, he would have done anything she wanted. It went against his beliefs, bro-code, whatever you want to call it; taking some other guy's girl? It crossed the line, but yeah. He'd've gone to Max if he'd only had to step over Logan's body to reach her. But Logan was a key domino in too many projects; if he went off the rails, who knew what the long term effects would be? And so, he'd turned her down and almost hated her for making him feel that ungodly level of frustration.

There was nothing like that in Ralph's hospital room, because he was right there with her: same emotions, same situation. They'd helped save Ralph from Manticore. They'd brought her to TC, tried to give her a new life, and they'd both failed her. Logan, sex, his hyperactive dick, her touch hunger: big fucking deal, compared to death and loss.

So, grief? Was that fair, 494? Was shared grief what that was? He'd sat with comrades in arms over a friend's dead body before, but none of them had the background with him that Max did, so it didn't compare. Maybe grief just felt different when you shared it with someone you deeply wanted to bone, who was also a hero whose tactics and fire you admired with every cell in your body, and whose respect you desperately wanted to earn. 

Someone you'd die to serve. 

Oh, that's cute, 494, he thought, rolling his eyes at himself. In case you forgot, numbnuts, she _asked_ you to serve her, and you put the war above her. Which, okay, admittedly, that was a great call. Good for you. But don't go around acting sixteen about her when you know goddamned well that there are lines you aren't gonna cross. 

Just like Rachel. He didn't cross Manticore for her, for her father, and it cost her life.

He felt his lips twist as his thoughts abruptly dove into the black hole in the center of his mind, the “What do I know?” world in which he could review the specs for every firearm known to man, but couldn't define what love meant to him, or what a father was. 

Thankfully, just then, Syl called a halt so he could confer with Jasper using the handy little app, and the needs of the mission superseded the confused mutterings of his stupid, dumb heart.

II.  
“Packed? We talking sardines or more like shipping containers?”

Alec rolled his eyes at Logan's tone. “Is there a difference?” 

They leaned over the conference table beneath the buzzing fluorescent lights that didn't do anyone any good, except for Max, who'd still look hot even in a damn mud mask. 

Alec continued his report. “The ER had outside tents up, but it was just for more space to take care of patients. They still haven't figured out the mode of transmission and the docs Syl talked to weren't making any pretenses at quarantine. Syl found about forty body bags at one site. She didn't see any others, but the fact they were racked up outside in the first place can't be good news.” He glanced around the table, frowning. “And then there's what I found when I got into their computers. According to the stats they've collected, fatality's at ninety-nine plus, with a virulence of around fifteen percent.”

“That's a pretty slow burn,” Max commented.

“Yeah, but a virus that takes out ninety-nine percent can take as long as it damn well likes. Still gonna get the job done eventually.” Alec shrugged. “The mechanism, near as they can figure, is it destroys muscle's ability to store glycogen, so patients just... run out of gas and stop. Die from heart failure, respiratory failure, or kidney failure, depending on what system's weakest.”

“Makes you weak so you can't fight, then kills your organs,” Max muttered. “Smart.”

“And, you know.... Clean. Relatively speaking,” Alec said. “Somebody's idea of mercy.”

“Sounds like White's holy rollers to a tee,” Mole growled.

“And explains why Manticore's transgenics piss them off so badly,” Logan said, leaning back in his chair. “You guys are engineered with redundant secondary systems. Normal human biology, no matter how refined, just can't match it. If that virus ever slips its leash and mutates, there's no question which side's gonna be left standing.”

“First time I've ever felt grateful to Manticore,” Max said, grinning. 

“So what do we do about it?” Alec asked, scanning the faces of the command staff around the conference table. “Cos jam-packed hospitals with blood on the walls freak me out, and I'm tellin' you, after what I saw today? I am officially freaked.”

“Well, first thing? Settle in, Logan, because you aren't setting foot outside Terminal City until we figure this bitch out. Right now, this is the safest place in the Seattle.” But even as the words left Max's mouth, she frowned, a worry line flickering between her eyebrows.

Hiding something from him. Again. This time, Alec didn't bother to conceal his disgust. He shook his head and glared at her while she studiously avoided looking at him.

Logan leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “Leaving that aside for now, I've got something. Thanks to Joshua, we've had a real breakthrough translating Max's runes. They seem to be a biochemical equation, a kind of—recipe. I've sent it on to my contacts for analysis.”

Got an organic chemist in your back pocket? Alec managed not to say it. 

“What's the time table on that?” Max asked.

Logan grimaced. “I don't know. I'll have to update you when I start to hear back. Hopefully I get a bite, but if not, Manticore had some genius types. Alec, you know anybody?”

“Sure,” Alec said. “If you got the recipe, I'll shop it around. But even if we find somebody who can read scorpion, there's this little problem where we don't have a way to manufacture it.”

“One problem at a time,” Max said. “Find someone who understands what this shit on my arms is trying to say first. Then we'll worry about the endgame.” 

III.  
As the meeting disbanded, Alec blurred around the table to grab Max's arm, ignoring Logan's shout of “Get your hands off her!”

“Excuse us,” he said over his shoulder. “There's a piece of information missing from my life.”

Max glared and broke his grip. “It's going to keep on missing, too. Who do you think you are?”

“Your lieutenant,” he said, staring flatly down at her, not giving an inch, biting off his words. “Also known as the guy who needs to know the thing you're holding back if I'm gonna do my job and keep these people safe.”

He knew he was acting crazy, but he was pissed off at her and not in the mood to conceal it.

She glared into his eyes for a beat more before she grabbed his arm and hustled him down the table. “It's all right, Logan,” she said over her shoulder. “You. C'mon.”

IV.  
Instead of going out the door or down the stairs, she took him up to the roof. 

This was Max's space; he'd never come here, even when he needed to speak to her and knew that was where she was. It was the same as his apartment. It was where she came to be alone.

But here he stood now, at the highest point in this area of Terminal City. The few electric lights in this sector barely broke the blackness of the night. In the distance, the lights of Seattle proper stained the sky orange. The clouds looked like smoke boiling off a fire, tinted by the lights below, a gray next door to black above. 

She folded her legs and sank down on the metal roof, so he settled in beside her, splaying his legs out in front of him, his forearms resting on his slightly bent knees. She, in turn, curled herself up, wrapped her arms around her bent legs and kicked her head back. He saw the flash of her throat as she breathed.

The cold metal was wet from the day's rain. He grimaced as chilly dampness seeped through the seat of his jeans.

“Well?” he asked, when it became evident she wasn't going to talk first. “You wanna tell me what you're hiding sometime before my balls freeze to this roof?”

“That sounds like it could be fun,” she said thoughtfully. “Let's wait til that happens.”

His sharp, wordless exhalation of impatience plumed upwards to the sky.

“Chill,” she said. “You, I mean, not your balls.”

And then she filled him in on Amberry's theory that a satellite had TC in its sights. 

“Oh. Oh, is that all? Well, that's good—that's great, just great.” He twisted his head away to bare his teeth in frustration. “Don't we have enough problems?”

“Apparently not,” she said. She regarded him. “You okay?”

“Just looking for the bomb,” he muttered.

She doodled random shapes in the condensation on the metal. “Logan hasn't put it together yet. I have a couple of the computer types modelling the weather and wind systems around this area, just to see if we can get a predictive date. But in the meantime, we have to start thinking about fallback positions.”

He turned to stare at her then, awed and surprised. It suddenly hit him that this was a different Max than the one he'd known. Not radically different, not change-your-name-and-your-country different, but... better. Steadier. More mature.

Great. With that realization, she'd just moved even farther out of his reach. He'd never catch up. There was no pain in that thought, just a deep respect and a desire to live up to her expectations. To serve her and help her and maybe, one day, hope to aspire to be like her.

Not that he'd ever tell her that. Kill himself, first.

“Fallback positions,” he muttered, mostly to redirect his brain, which was in full-on Hero Worship mode. He picked at the hem of his jeans, which was sucking up water from the roof like a paper towel. Well, that could easily be a hell of a lot worse. If he'd forgotten his waders, like Genie had today, his jeans would have wicked up a lot more than some innocent rainwater. If they didn't get this virus sorted out, the Sewer Superhighway was going to be the only way to get around this burg for the rest of his life, and he just wasn't ready for that....

The pieces clicked together in his head and he sucked in breath and spun to look at Max. “Holy shit!” 

“What bit you?” she asked.

“Our sewer system! We turn it into a bomb shelter!”

And then he had the unspeakable pleasure of seeing Max's own expression of awe and surprise turned on him. 

V.  
The next couple of weeks were a blur. Moving the people of Terminal City down to the sewers below was a project that sounded easy on paper and wasn't at all in reality. Everybody worked.

It was the good kind of hard work, though: heavy, not frustrating. The sewers needed water, electricity, and stores of food. It needed storage for clothing and bedding and raw materials. It needed bathrooms and kitchens. It needed places for sleeping and places for play. It needed workshops to build what they lacked. The transgenics of TC didn't know how long they might have to stay down there, but as the project went on, some started to talk about how convenient it would be to live down there forever. Some of the spaces were almost palatial, built back in the days when even underground tunnels needed cathedral ceilings. Wire some lights up there, this faction said, and life could be pretty sweet, underground.

Max and Alec did not agree. They didn't talk about it, but two days was as much as either of them could stand buried beneath the weight of the world. After awhile down in the bomb shelter—it was psychologically easier to manage than “sewer,” and more accurate, too, considering it'd been years since those tunnels had seen waste—they both had to lay on the roof of Max's hideaway, chests expanding as they gulped the fresh air, as thirsty for it as they would be for water. 

This was something they did without telling Logan. Alec didn't know how Max justified that to herself, because to him, it definitely felt like they crossed a line when they went up to the roof at three o'clock in the morning, with everyone else asleep, knowing she'd snuck out on Logan to be with him.

But he also knew how badly he needed it, the friendly silence and easy companionship of starbathing by her side, and he didn't carry a quarter of the stress she did. So he said nothing.

The nights grew colder. When they finally got up just before dawn, rested for another day of schlepping boxes underground and pounding spikes into gaps between bricks, the prints of their bodies were left behind in the frost, his big-shouldered frame alongside her wasp-waisted hourglass. Those impressions, slate-gray against white, moved him deeply. Sometimes he stood there after she went back inside, hands fisted in the pockets of his coat, watching the impressions fade as they frosted over—fade, but not disappear, which was important to him. 

Alec didn't see much of Logan, but what he did see made him grimace. Logan was regularly dosing himself with blood; Alec could tell by the crisp way he moved, the color in his complexion, the tang in his odor. As the bomb shelter project continued, he thought Logan might even be overdosing a bit, revving himself up; he didn't seem to need as much sleep as he once did, and he showed flashes of unusual strength on those occasions he helped out. Mostly, however, he stayed on the computer, conferring with his contacts about the recipe for the cure.

And every night on the news: mounting death tolls from the virus, riots caused by shortages, and atrocities committed by the military as civil order broke down. Max grew pale, lost weight. The clock to the end of the world was running down; the spinning top had begun to wobble on its axis.

VI.  
They were down there again, scouting an offshoot no one'd improved yet, wondering what should be done with it, if anything, when Alec tasted peaches.

He spun around and stared back at the tunnel, calculating the time he had before the quake hit and how far he might get before it did. They were far away from anybody else. This was a bad habit they'd fallen into, going off by themselves to discuss whether some bit of sewer was worth developing or not. People would talk.

This was going to be a bad one, too, because he remembered, terror like a ball of ice in his stomach, that he hadn't had his tryptophan for at least ten days. More than enough time for the serotonin levels in his brain to ebb. And he was in the middle of a seizure cycle—what was wrong with him?

Too many things to keep in mind, that's all, and not enough mind to keep them in. Typical. 

“Alec?” Max reached out to him. “What's wrong?”

Violet bloomed over her face like a watercolor stain, drifting to orange, then blue. 

“Something I probably shoulda told you, Maxie,” he said breathlessly, lips twitching into a nervous smile. “You're gonna be mad.”

But he didn't have time to confess, because that was when the world ripped away from him.

VII.  
It's like losing your skin, losing the thing that separates you from the void, losing the world. He'd say it's what dying might feel like, except he hopes, when he dies, it's not quite so goddamn terrifying.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All right, not written in one sitting, as of this chapter.

I.  
“You should have told me.”

Alec rolled his head towards her, an oddly loud crunching sound against the gritty floor. His large green eyes focused on her face. That was an improvement.

They were still in the tunnel. While Alec had been actively seizing, she'd focused on keeping him safe. When he finally stopped, she'd tried to evac him, but he hadn't been able to walk, didn't seem to know who or where he was. She could carry him out, but if he seized again while he was on her back, he could injure them both. Per Max's standing orders, a search party should be on its way soon, bringing help, so she'd decided to sit tight. 

Bit by bit, he came back. It was like watching a puzzle be assembled. 

“You should have told me,” she repeated through her teeth, and jabbed his shoulder.

“Ow. Couldn't tell you. You'd've put me on the bench.”

“Yes. I would have.”

“And you need me.” His eyes dared her to disagree.

She rested the back of her head against the wall and stared at the grimy ceiling. She'd sat there, arms wrapped around her knees, long enough to grow stiff. He was stretched out in front of her, a red mark on his cheekbone which would be purple by tomorrow marking where he'd struck his head against the wall despite her best efforts. He'd have other bruises, too. He hadn't overstated how bad his “bad ones” were. 

The problem with seizures—or, at least seizures caused by Manticore's fuckup—was they all carried the risk of sudden death. Flail around long enough, hard enough, and your heart could stop, one of the tender branches in the brain could rupture. Like that. Being conscious through the seizure was a good sign—it was scary as hell, losing control of your body, being helpless that way, but it meant, in the grand scheme, that your dance session would probably be free of fatal consequences.

That did not describe Alec's seizures. He got swept off the planet, leaving his brainless body behind to flail and smack its head and froth at the mouth. Remembering how it looked made her cold all over.

“I do need you. That's why you should have told me, instead of _lying to me_ like a total jackass!” She punched his shoulder again.

“Ow.” 

“You'd've been out of the fight, but only until I pulled a heist and got your medicine,” she said. “What were you thinking? Ever think what would've happened if you'd seized while on a mission?!”

“Notice how I always took a backup with me?” He raised his eyebrows. “Huh? Huh? Not so dim, me.”

“Yeah, true-blue Manticore drones, like that Genie! Ones who still think it's okay to abandon your commander if it's between that and failing the mission. Do you have a death wish or something?”

She was getting shrill. She tapped her head against the wall and huffed at the ceiling, collecting herself. 

“Max,” Alec said. “You prioritize the troops over the mission, and that's good; I wish I thought like that. I don't, though, because every mission is part of a greater plan. If I've gotta be left behind to make something work—”

“Oh, spare me the 'we happy few' bullshit—”

“Why? It's what you need me for.”

Her gaze snapped down to him so sharply it hurt her neck. His lips were parted in that smartass semi-smile he gave when he knew he was right as hell. 

“Logan's like you. Idealistic. You study history, though, and ideals are what lead to the big body counts. Pragmatism saves lives. So some sad sacks get sacrificed along the way, big whup. A lot more will die if the war doesn't end.”

“If you're so smart, then why aren't you leading this army?” she muttered.

“Because,” he said, after a pause, “sometimes I think things like, let's let the virus wipe the normals out. That'd be one set of enemies down. Battle White's guys to the ground, or better yet, tinker with their own bug until it takes them out too, and then we win. Forever.”

His honey-colored lashes drifted down to hide his eyes from her.

“My goal is to see our people through this; yours is to see _everybody_ through this,” he said quietly. “So there's why I need you, Maxie. You're the only way I got to keep Ben quiet.”

Max's breath caught in her throat.

“I didn't know you ever thought about him.”

His dimples flashed when he grimaced. “I spent six months in Psy-Ops on account of his ass. Why wouldn't I?”

Ben, Alec's sensitive, psychotic clone, who'd set devotion to his imaginary Lady at the center of his universe, then decided to sacrifice that universe to her glory. The first time Max saw Alec, she'd almost had a psychotic break herself. She'd had to kill Ben, who was critically injured, to save herself, and that still hurt, even now.

To hear Alec say he shared an irrational devotion to duty with his clone? Huge. Because it meant he shared Ben's crystalline emotions, his imagination, the parts of his clone that had been made of light. 

She smoothed her hand over Alec's forehead, and he closed his eyes again, slowly, as though his thick lashes had grown too heavy to hold open.

“But I worry,” he said. His voice still dragged, though it was clearer than it had been. “Say I follow you; we execute your plan. Normals and transgenics never make real peace. People die in this conflict for the rest of time, or maybe it all leads up to a total war that destroys the Earth. Who's to say then my plan—Ben's plan—wouldn't've been the right move?”

“We can't possibly know,” Max said. The backs of her fingers read the sandpapery scritch of stubble on his cheeks, the slightly arched line of his jaw. She ghosted her thumb over his lips and his breath washed over her hand as he sighed. “Ben didn't believe in innocence, Alec, not really, but there are innocent people. They'd never hurt us, or anyone, if they could help it. They're gentle, loving... and they deserve to be saved, too.”

“Save the unicorns,” Alec quipped with the old sarcasm.

Usually, this is where she'd pop him one, but she didn't. She pet his throat beneath his jaw. The sweat there had dried to salt. She dipped beneath the collar of his shirt to trace the line of his clavicle, enjoying the feel of hard bone beneath freckled skin.

“Uhhhhh, Max...?” Alec said. “Um.”

The cartilage in his throat leapt against the palm of her hand as he swallowed. He shifted uncomfortably.

She shhed him. Yeah, she knew what she was doing to him, which was, given the givens, pretty damned impressive, actually. She liked that she could put him in that state with nothing but her closeness; she always had. But more than that, _touch:_ his skin against her skin, and nobody had to die. It was like drinking the starlight in on the roof after three days spent in darkness, surrounded by grimy stone.

He trembled. 

“Max?” he said, and though he was shaking, his voice was not. “Getting kinda cold, lying here.”

She scoffed. “That's your line?”

“Do I need one?” He gave her a narrow look. “Try this then: come here.” 

She slid down the wall as he turned on his side, wincing with the effort of moving. Once she'd thought her attraction to him was based on nothing more than animal instincts—find the strongest man, then mate—and maybe that was still true on some level, but the cat would have passed over this post-ictal man with a sniff and gone in search of someone who could service her; Max, in full possession of her right mind, pressed the front of her body against the front of his, felt his arm go over her waist and draw her closer, even as she slid her palm up his back beneath his shirt.

“You are cold,” she said, as though the discovery were a surprise.

“You're not,” he said. His breath fluttered like wings against her neck where it smoothed into the line of her shoulder. He was taking the scent of her off her skin.

Slowly, almost hesitantly, he pulled up her shirt to touch her lower back, so lightly her skin seemed to spark, as though bridging a gap one atom wide with electricity. She moaned, and then blushed, her skin flaming with embarrassment, because what was she, twelve? All he did was shh her, holding her against him with his whole palm pressed to her back. 

Meanwhile, she stroked him, his long muscles like corded wires. She kneaded them to see how much they'd give, felt Alec's involuntary ripple of reaction. He moved against her, slotted himself against her groin in echo of a dance she'd never danced with her whole heart. 

Now it was Alec's turn to be embarrassed. He blushed and stammered through half an apology.

“It's okay,” she said. If some normal guy out in the world tried that with her, she'd deck him, because that was against the rules and not how it was done, but she and Alec could be honest about what they didn't know and how easily they lost control, the steps they skipped because they didn't know they were there. 

Or, in other words: so he'd dry-humped her, big fucking deal. She wasn't exactly giving him an easy time here, and, not gonna lie, the pulsing heat of him against her was not unwelcome.

She trailed her fingernails up his back just to see what he'd do and he moved again, his breath gone jagged, a single pleading, creeling note breaking quietly beneath. 

She found his mouth in the dark. It opened beneath hers as soon as her lips brushed his. His flavor was nothing like she thought it would be, but she loved it all the same, drinking him, the scent of him all around her, his hand gone low to hold her against him as he slowly ground against her, ignoring the barriers of her cargo pants, his jeans.

So, so tired of barriers, of mere hints of heat, silky firmness, pumping blood. She slid her hand down his flank, over the crest of his hipbone, and hooked her fingers in the thick leather of his belt—

He snatched her wrist and tore away from her, staring, his eyes wide and startled. 

“I can't,” he said. 

“Excuse me?” She hiked herself up on one elbow so she could glare at him. He still gripped her wrist.

“We lost control,” he said, and let her go. He leaned back, put some space between them. Heat still rolled off his body, but his face was all grim determination. “Nobody's fault. But I can't.”

His mouth wobbled and he looked down. Moving as though it hurt, he slowly stood.

Angrily, she leapt to her feet. “Mr. Playboy of the Year is telling me he 'can't?'”

“Don't do that,” he said, standing with his back to her, head bent as he breathed. He was shaking. She walked a short distance away, because yeah, she was being unfair, unreasonable, but dammit... she ached so badly.

“Sorry,” she said. He waved it off as she went on, “but I don't get your problem. The Alec I know's got no problem with the concept of 'no strings attached.'”

His eyes heavy and shadowed, mouth a flat line, as he watched her without turning to her. 

“If I let you touch me like you were about to... that would have been... and I don't want it like that.” He looked down the tunnel. “Not here. Not with the cavalry due any minute. Not with me shaking like some old man.”

Max stepped to him. He swung his shoulder back to invite her closer, a small, reassuring motion. She slipped her arm around his waist and his went around her shoulder, and maybe he meant it friendly—she told herself she did, anyway—but as he looked down at her, she tipped her face up to his, and then they both stepped back with a groan.

Alec laughed bitterly. 

“Your thing, with Logan,” he said, looking at her from beneath his lashes. “You're not ever going to deal with it, are you? Not honestly.”

“Tell me the honest way to deal and we'll see.” She glanced at him. He had his eyebrows raised, eyes narrowed, lips pressed together: his “are you fucking kidding me?” face.

“Well, that puts me in a hell of a position,” he said, “because I can't avoid you, Maxie. And I'm not strong enough to keep saying no to you. You keep pressing me, one of these days I'll give up and give in, and then? I'll hate myself. See how easy that is? Honesty. Try it.”

“Alec, if I knew how I felt, I'd tell him!” The anguish in her voice rang loud in the dark.

He stared down the tunnel, stuffed his fists in the pockets of his coat and scuffed the floor with his boot. He glared at her, angry dimples making dents above the downturned corners of his mouth. “Sounds like a personal problem. You oughta figure that out. Until you do, stop fucking with my head.”

He didn't stop glaring at her, even as she opened her mouth, closed it. She had no defense. He was right. 

He was right, and she had the feeling he'd said more to her just then than she'd understood. The depth of his emotions made her own look like the thin shiny coating on a cheap Christmas ornament. “On the surface, pretty colors,” was how Joshua had described him, “but underneath, darkness; confusion.” 

He stretched out on his back again. “Now get over here.”

She blinked. “Stop fucking with your head, but get back down on the floor with you.” 

“No, don't lay down, but definitely hold my head, cos in a few seconds I'm gonna seize again.”

II.  
Max jumped out of her chair as Al approached, buffing the webbing between his skeletal fingers with a rag that reeked of rubbing alcohol. 

“How is he?” 

The glare Logan shot her let her know she'd missed the “calm commander” tone she'd aimed for by a mile.

Al was exactly what you didn't want in a medical professional: bizarrely cheerful, no matter what. His job in Manticore had been autopsying infants and children who'd died from genetic errors. Since he'd never have to do that again, nothing could sink his balloon. Now he beamed at nothing and no-one as he tossed the rag in a nearby bin.

“Whelp, took my whole stock of benzos just to knock him out. When he wakes up, I'll have to move on to intravenous whiskey! Okay, tough room.... Here's the thing. He's gonna keep on seizing until the underlying problem is fixed, and every seizure he has is a roll of the dice. Eventually he's gonna stroke out, and there's not a thing I can do to stop it.”

He plopped down in a chair, beaming. “He needs high-dose serotonin supplementation combined with a long-acting agent. Good luck finding that!”

“Dr. Shankar,” Max said. “Logan, have you talked to her?”

Logan started to scrub his face, but he'd put on gloves, so he raked his hands through his hair instead. “She's a doctor,” he said. “Assuming she's not already dead, she'll be too busy to come to the phone, let alone make a house call to Terminal City.”

“Well, then, looks like I'll just have to go to her.”

“Hold it.” Logan snagged her arm as she spun to walk out the door. “Stop, Max. Think. Dr. Shankar's office is in the middle of Seattle. It'll take a whole operation to get there.”

“There's no time to put together a whole operation.” Max whipped her arm free of Logan's grip, or tried to; he put up an effective resistance before she managed to break his grasp. Staring at him suspiciously, she said, more slowly, “I know the way. Even through the sewers, my sense of direction is the best in TC: thank you, Jam Pony.”

“You can't go alone.”

“Why not?” Max dodged Logan as he tried to snatch her again, and yeah, he was definitely faster than he used to be.

He eyed her as she glared. If she engaged with this whole new-speed-new-strength thing, it'd take precious time she didn't have, and he knew it. The corner of his mouth quirked up.

She said, “One person can get in and get out with a lot less risk than a whole platoon. Especially if I'm the one.”

“And what happens to this place when you're captured, or, God forbid, shot and killed?” 

“If I die, and he dies, then someone else steps up. This is a city of trained commandos, Logan. I don't foresee a leadership shortage.”

“But, Max... these people need you. I—” Logan stared through the double doors, his lips pressed thin. Alec was visible through their windows, a broad-shouldered figure motionless beneath white sheets.

Max grabbed his shirt and dragged him down to snarl into his face. His eyes shocked wide: this was the first time she'd initiated contact since Manticore infected her with the love-bug. 

“Hear this: I am going,” she said. “You can't stop me. And when I come back, I am going to kick your ass over... whatever. I know you did something. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you,” Logan said. “Now understand me.” He reached up and grabbed her wrist with his gloved hand. It was the same wrist Alec had grabbed, and his fingers overlapped the bruises he'd left. She hadn't noticed at the time, and neither had he.

“I've seen you through some tough fits,” he said. “You were scared, of course, but you never died. Max, out of your whole class, only a few ever died! This condition you all have is not fatal, is what I'm driving at, but the Home Guard out there? White's cult? Some random crazy with a gun? Those are! This is an unnecessary risk. You're putting yourself in danger for no good reason.”

“Don't compare my condition to his. You don't know a thing about this bitch.” Max checked her tone, and sighed. “Logan, you didn't _see_ him. I did, and I'm scared for him, so I'm going.” Her voice hardened again. “And unless you somehow revved up your hand-to-hand fighting skills too, I suggest you let. Go. Of. My. Wrist.”

Logan did and stepped back from her.

“You know what, Max? We need to talk.”

“You think?” Max glared at him one final time and then let the door slam behind her on her way out.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy crap. All I wanted to write was a fight scene, and then this? thing? happened.

I.  
Getting to Dr. Shankar's office took too long.

Breaking in took too long.

Looking for the meds? Take a wild guess. 

There was a thin layer of undisturbed dust on everything. When she finally found the meds (in a milk crate beneath Dr. Shankar's desk, weirdly enough) she loaded every pill and bottle into a bag, swaddled that bag in plastic and cloth, and crammed the whole thing into her pack. She wasn't trying to conceal them, but protect them from conditions in the sewer: none of them were illegal or even all that interesting, unless you were an X5 or hunting X5's.

She gave a silent salute—for Dr. Beverly Shankar was almost certainly dead—before she left the office.

The sewer grate she needed was a half-mile away. It was full dark, so the hoverdrones weren't much of a problem, but she still felt nervous—exposed—out in the open without the camouflage of a crowd. As she trotted to the grate, she glanced around her with curiosity. With one thing and another, it had been over a month since she'd last left Terminal City.

The buildings and the streets didn't look much different than before, but only because Seattle couldn't get any grungier. The few people, though: pale, sickly-looking, with darting, terrified eyes. Many were wounded, their injuries badly dressed with rags. Soldiers everywhere, and elaborate cordons of colored tape Max could only guess marked hot zones and restricted areas. She passed the soldiers like the civilians did: nervously, glancing at them, skittering away when they returned her glance. No point in sticking out by looking confident when everyone else seemed so shit-scared.

With a pang, she thought of Original Cindy. Last they'd talked, before cell service got seriously spotty, OC was planning to slip the quarantine and leave town. The news was reporting that quarantine jumpers were being shot, and with as aggro as Home Guard had gotten, Max believed it. She'd tried to dissuade her, tried to convince her to come to Terminal City, but it just didn't work; Original Cindy was so terrified of plagues, she'd gone tharn. 

Where was Original Cindy tonight? Max hoped she was down in Orange County, sippin' a screwdriver made from fruit she'd plucked from the tree, but more likely, she was dead or dying. 

God, that hurt, but at least she could think it without going catatonic. She'd changed since the old days.

She congratulated herself on that, on the bag full of meds heavy on her back, on the way Alec would stand up and grin and be her second-in-command again. The sewer grate was just ahead.

She slithered through it—

—and dropped directly into a fight. 

II.  
Someone grabbed her legs and swung her into the pipes with superhuman strength.

Hint one: Ow.

It took her night vision a second to adapt to the total darkness of the sewer, but the people striking her—more than one—seemed able to see just fine. One of them got a hit in on her nose that made her eyes water.

Hint two: _Ow._

She jumped around a lot. Multiple attackers, close quarters, poor visibility: she hoped they'd do her a favor and knock each other out, at least a few of them. But four times out of five, once she finally got good air, someone snatched her ankle or her calf and racked her right back into those goddamn pipes. 

Hint three: _*Ow.*_

Enhanced strength, enhanced senses, enhanced reflexes: either Max had a mutiny on her hands back at the old homestead, or White's familiars had found her. 

The next time she got cracked against the pipes, she gripped one and when they pulled her from the wall, the pipe came with her. Goodie. Now she had a weapon. The pipe changed the game: it extended her reach, let her defend her frame, and helped her pivot without regard for her X-axis. 

One by one, her attackers dropped. She moved the fight down the sewer when the bodies on the ground started messing with her footing, making sure to give each one a goodbye stomp as she ran.

She surprised herself by laughing. Months without a good fight, and, duh, she had some frustrations to work through: despite the bruises and the cracked bones blossoming pain all over her body, she was having fun.

At least, it was all fun and games until she lost her pipe. She found it again pretty fast, because the familiar who took it from her used it to crack her skull open.

III.  
Max blinked awake but didn't move for a long moment while she assessed how bad the concussion was. Double vision, nausea. Her face felt like she was wearing a beauty mask, it was so crusted with blood, and even more soaked her pillow, but that was just drama: head wounds bled like that. She touched the edges of it. Yup. Her scalp was split down to the bone. If it didn't get stapled in the next few hours, she'd have a great whack of a scar to brag about. Yippee. 

Her eyes gradually decided to work together again and focused on the person who sat in a plain wooden chair outside her cell. Gray robe, ashes caked on as makeup, sinuous lines drawn around the eyes in paint. Two torches on either side cast dancing shadows. She kept her eyes off them; they made her queasy.

“How are you feeling?” 

“You've been tracking genetic lines for a thousand years; why do you people still find light-switches so goddamn mystifying?” she grumbled.

“Atmosphere,” he replied.

“I could hook you up with some real up-and-coming interior designers. Give it some thought, cos you could really use the help.”

It was time to experiment. She wasn't looking forward to it, but she swung her legs off the bed and stood up slowly. The world swung crazily around her; she dry-heaved and staggered.

“That's a nasty blow you took. It's making things... difficult. Mind if I come in and do some first aid?”

“Knock yourself out,” Max said, “which is exactly what will happen if you do anything besides help.” 

The man chuckled. “Don't worry. I'm Jeremiah, your interrogator, not your torturer or your executioner. If they come, they'll let you know who they are. As a rule, we don't like surprises, and I, in particular, dislike deception.”

“Noble,” Max said. She swayed as the familiar opened the cage door, entered, and locked it behind him; it would have been a beautiful opportunity to escape, except for the way the ground pitched beneath her feet. Walking was beyond her right now; she'd just fall over.

Jeremiah wasn't a bad medic. He sat her down on the cot and patched up her skull with deftness and care, then crouched down in front of her. Now that he was close, and away from the nauseating, uncertain torchlight, she saw his eyes were brown.

He took her hands between his palms as he stared up at her. 

“So what do you want to know?” she asked. 

“That easy?” He almost seemed disappointed.

“That easy,” she said. 

“I want to know which one you're going to pick,” he said.

The staples he just put in her scalp hurt like hell. Max realized it was from the way she'd raised her eyebrows.

“The one on the left?” she ventured. 

“Of your two men,” he said gently. 

Max touched her head wound. “I must still be unconscious. This is all some whacked-out coma dream.” She sat back, giggling. “That's great! I mean, you hear stories, but you never believe it until it happens to you. Hey, you think if I tried hard enough, I could get a giraffe to walk by?”

He smiled. “If it comforts you to think of it that way, I invite you to do so. But may I remind you of the existence of the paranormal breeding line? My bloodline, actually. For a thousand years, we've mated individuals with ESP, high empathy, and persuasiveness, and I assure you, the results are startling.”

“And you're using these 'startling results' to ask about my love life. Yeah, I buy that.”

He shrugged self-effacingly. “All mind-readers are incurable romantics, but we keep secrets very, very well.”

Love life. Something nibbled at the edges of her consciousness. Some worry. It was hard to concentrate, her head hurt so badly.

“You're worried about this,” Jeremiah said, holding up a finger to signal for patience while he dragged her backpack out from under her cot. “We searched it, of course, but it's all innocuous. Medicine to remedy Manticore's inept bumbling. Who needs it?”

“The X5's,” Max said. “Near as I can tell, they wanted to fix the X4's tendency to narcolepsy and just broke it worse. X6's seem to be doing all right, though.”

“But who needs it?” 

“Alec,” she said. And suddenly she doubled over and was sick in the bucket beside her bed, because Alec didn't have long, if he wasn't dead already, and she was locked in a dungeon with every scrap of medicine that could possibly help him. 

Her interrogator nodded.

IV.  
“So why exactly am I here?” she asked the next day.

A hot meal and an hour's sleep, she felt almost healthy again. If Jeremiah entered her cell today, he was gonna get a hell of a surprise.

He didn't. He dragged the chair close to the cell door and sat down in it, his posture as precise as a T-square. 

“The virus. You might have noticed it out there.”

“Yeah, I have. I thought you all were cheering for that hot mess.”

“We are,” he said, “but Sandeman, one of our own, was not. He coded your genes with the cure for our virus, the virus meant to cull the weak and unworthy.”

“You want the cure? Tell you what, soon as we crack it, I'll make it open source. So I can go now, right?”

“Of course not. Don't waste Alec's time by being foolish.”

Max stopped herself before she asked how he knew Alec was still alive, because of course, he was just fucking with her mind. Like Mia, the psy-0perative from Manticore, whose creed seemed to have been, _have cool mental powers, will manipulate._

“But what else do you want?” she asked. “All I've got are some squiggly lines. If we had the cure, we'd've used it already. We're not that keen on being masters of the Earth.”

“The plan was to kill you. The memory of Sandeman's rebellion would die with you. Then we discovered a flaw.”

“Oh, so you guys are coming down with it, too?”

Jeremiah blinked and Max laughed in the face of his evident confusion. “Only explanation for why you're giving me these sweet digs and comforting chats. So, whaddya want, my runes? _Take 'em._ May they bring you joy. Just let me get back with this medicine before—”

“What will you do if he's dead already?” 

Max stopped talking. In her head, in surround-sound living color, she burst into the medical wing of TC, the heavy backpack bouncing on her shoulder. Logan darted in from the side, reaching out for her with his white-gloved hands, but she button-hooked around him and put her shoulder to the double doors, flung them open, just to see—an empty bed.

Flash, and now she was in the morgue. She'd never been in the morgue. It was dark and shadowy and the details didn't matter, because there was a steel table, and stretched out on it was Alec's naked body, pale as marble.

The backpack thudded to her feet.

A faucet dripped in the double sink in the corner, slowed until the individual drops of water turned to glass beads. She touched his hand, cold as clay in the winter. The lines on his palm shimmered like the shadows of spiderwebs, thin skin stretched over the muscle fibers at the base of his thumb. Scars from breaking windows, busting faces, sharpening knives. Calluses everywhere. He even had calluses on his blunt fingertips, and she remembered wisecracking with him once about playing guitar. She'd never heard him play, and now, she never would.

“I should have told you,” she said. “I should have told you both.”

V.  
“Told him what?”

She couldn't answer. Part of her still believed Alec was dead. It was just some freaky thing this mind-fucker had done to her, but she couldn't shake it. In her bones, in the pit of her stomach: a heaviness that was also somehow an emptiness. He's dead.

“It'll pass,” he said. 

His voice broke her paralysis. She jumped to her feet.

“Look,” she said, “is there any way I can help you speed this up? Get you what you want? Fast-forward to the killing-me portion? Cos, see, there's this thing where when you guys try to kill me, you always fuck it up, and then I can bust out of here and I can go home. I'm really, really motivated to reach that moment. So just skip all the foreplay and start _interrogating me_ already!”

“I wish it were that simple. It's not. Trust the process, Max.”

Max bit back a scream. Took a deep breath. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Process me.”

VI.  
“You know, if we wanted, we could probably cure the Manticore virus, clumsy as their geneticists are.”

Max interrupted her pacing to shoot him a black look. All day they'd gone back and forth along her personal timeline with Logan, replaying every innocent touch, every doe-eyed look, every laugh, that time she saw the line of his profile gilded by the light of his desk lamp and melted. 

She felt violated and frightened and... unstable. For a year, she'd been quietly disengaging from Logan. Both of them had adjusted to the idea of life without one another. The more violently they declared they couldn't do without each other, the more they drew away inside. All these things were true.

But being rocketed into the past when it was all still new—when Logan was the first person, ever, to look at her as though she were precious and not shrink from her essential strangeness—brought those old feelings back, full strength. The wonder of it.

Jeremiah was an affable host. He made sure she had enough water, food when she wanted it. If she needed a break, he gave her one. But, despite all that, he was evil. The very last thing she needed was to have her feelings for Logan buffed to a high sheen while she continued to be terrified for Alec's life. Two powerful feelings on opposite poles, ripping her apart.

He asked, “What would you do if we cured it?”

“You about to shoot me into another alternate reality? Because, fair warning? Might be an overshare.”

“I will—soon—but for now, I just want you to think about it.”

VII.  
The next day, they covered the resentments.

Alec, with his laughing and his talking and his breathing, dragging his messes into her life. Every time she saved his ass, the price was something she'd desperately wanted. The cure for the virus; the precious few hours she'd earned with Logan when she'd found a temporary cure. He couldn't have cleaved them apart any more efficiently if he'd tried.

His opportunism. His materialism. His mercenary nature. No moral compass except his own benefit. No empathy for the suffering of others. It was a hard, cruel world, and some sad sacks had to suffer and die in it. Not his problem.

His _lying_ , made even worse because he didn't lie to himself; he knew exactly what hid behind his attention-deficit veneer, but he wouldn't let anyone else in. He used drama to distract anyone who got too close to the truth. The whole world existed merely to help throw people off his trail. Without any cause to serve except his own, he was an agent of chaos.

But once he committed to a cause, he was a demon in harness. That time he burst into her cell at Manticore, fully expecting to have sex with her. He didn't want it any more than she did, but he'd do it anyway, because _orders_. Nothing more than a double-rape engineered by their puppet masters, is what she'd thought then. The fact he wore Ben's face was the sick cherry on top.

Touch wasn't a commodity. Touch couldn't be commanded. Some orders weren't meant to be followed. Some causes didn't need to be served. 

Jeremiah flipped the script. Logan's turn. 

He used her. She was his samurai, and he didn't hesitate to put her life in danger for something he wanted, even if the only cause it served was his own. He didn't cherish her specialness. Again and again, he withdrew from her when he was reminded of what she couldn't help: the circumstances of her birth and rearing.

He wanted to tangle with the rough issues, but only because he saw them as problems to be solved. Once he became disabled, he did everything but accept it and adjust, because “different” meant “less than.” All he could focus on was what he'd lost, instead of what he stood to gain by moving forward.

There were other forms of intimacy, but he wanted missionary vanilla classic or nothing. She'd said she'd wanted “perfect,” and perfect was what she'd get, by God; nevermind she'd meant “perfect” as the two of them being one, both thinking about and wanting the same thing—a feat they'd never managed. They could barely even _talk_ about the same thing at the same time.

By the time Jeremiah was through with Logan, the virus almost looked like a blessing in disguise. It had united them against a single difficulty and forced them to be more gentle, more supportive, more loving in their speech, because they no longer had the luxury of letting a nice cuddle spackle over all the hurt feelings and misunderstandings.

It was exhausting.

By the time it was all over, she was snarling, rendered incoherent by anger and pain.

VIII.  
“It's time,” Jeremiah said.

Max raised her head. She was hunched on the edge of her cot, arms wrapped around her middle, dreading him. 

“I think we've activated all the pertinent short and long-term memories,” he said. “Today might be the last day, Max. You've been a good soldier. Just be strong a little while longer.”

She shivered. 

“We can cure your virus, just like you can cure ours,” he said. “If we did, what would you do?”

She stepped into base and walked up the stairs. Alec glanced up at her from the long table below. Papers piled messily in front of him, a pencil stuck behind his ear, a rifle leaning against the side of his chair. He met her eyes and the corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile. Maybe she smiled back at him, because he gave a little wave before he turned back to his conference with Mole, still chomping his cigar.

She took off her jacket as she walked to their suite of rooms. Unbuttoned her motorcycle gauntlets and pulled them off. Tucked them in the pocket of her coat and folded it over her arm, then dropped it on a chair as soon as she entered the suite.

Logan stood with his back to her, writing on a giant white board. The writing on it first had the jumbled quality of all writing in dreams, but then—she was getting good at identifying this by now—Jeremiah gave her a little nudge, and it suddenly coalesced, solidified, into the barbed-wire symbols of organic chemistry. A doodled molecule down in the corner of the board that Jeremiah made her look at intently, though it didn't mean anything much to her. She'd done alright in biochem, but it wasn't a core skill of hers.

 _When did I ever see the actual equation?_ she thought. A fog descended on the room, and Logan began to recede, before Jeremiah applied the throttle and everything snapped back into focus. She forgot she'd even had the errant thought.

“Logan?” she said.

“Yeah, Max.” He sounded absorbed in his work. 

She stepped in close to him. The familiar scent of his hair. The way the vertebrae crested at the base of his neck. His shoulders seemed too narrow and she wondered if he'd lost weight.

He turned then and his eyes widened with fear when he saw how close she was. “Max!” 

“It's all right,” she said, smiling. “See?”

She reached out to cup his face, but when he flinched away, she took his naked hand instead, his elegant, smooth fingers trembling in hers.

He gaped at her. “You're cured?”

She nodded, then tilted her chin at the white board. “So that's for the world now, not for me.”

Logan blinked rapidly in confusion. “This was always for the world, Max.” 

There was no heat. No magnetic pull towards his lips. He was busy with this equation, which was for the good of the world. She'd kiss him when he knocked off for the day, when she could have his full attention. It was all right, now. They had all the time in the world.

“Max! Need you down here!” Alec shouted.

“Sounds urgent,” Logan said, half-turning back to his white board.

“Yeah,” she said. “Better get to it.”

They smiled at each other one more time before she turned to walk out the door. 

IX.  
She swam towards the light from the dark depths of the sound, broke into consciousness like breaking through the skin of water, and took a deep breath.

She blinked, the way you'd blink water from your lashes, and kicked her head back to suck in a grateful breath. 

She understood. She understood.

X.  
“Yes,” Jeremiah said. “I have it now.”

He sat in his chair, erect and still and peaceful.

She gazed at him. All the pain he'd put her through and the intensity of her hatred for him all evaporated in the immensity of the quiet she'd earned inside her heart.

“I have it, too,” she said.

He smiled. “I think now is the time to move on to the—what did you call it? The killing-you, fucking-it-up portion of things?”

Max looped the straps of her pack over her shoulders. Jeremiah had no more intention of killing her than she had of holding a torch to this backpack. 

“You mind-readers are all incurable romantics,” she said.

“But we keep secrets very, very well,” he finished.

He stepped forward and opened the door to her cage. 

“One question first. It's just gonna bug me,” she said.

“Where did you ever see the translated equation?” Jeremiah smiled. He was younger than she'd thought. His eyes were like hers, so dark the pupils were invisible, round and thickly lashed in a round face; the crusted coat of ash on his skin was flaking off the way the dried blood on hers had long since cracked. “You never did,” he said. “You knew it all along. But you wouldn't let yourself see it until you were balanced; just as the equation won't work unless it, too, is balanced.”

“A lot quicker than copying my runes and doing it the hard way,” she said.

He tipped his head, acknowledging the compliment. Then he became brisk. “Go down this hall until you find the crack in the wall. It leads to a tunnel of raw earth. Take the second turning on the left; there'll be a ladder leading down into the sewers. From there, it's up to you.”

She asked a silent question with her eyes.

He looked down. “The first answer is, the virus has failed; there's no more need to kill you. The second answer, though, would require my own interrogation, and you have neither the skill nor the time.” He tugged the strap of her backpack, though she needed no reminder. “Now go.”


	8. Chapter 8

Alec wadded up his hospital scrubs and threw them against the wall of his apartment the minute the door closed behind him. They hit with a satisfying thump.

“What are you doing out of the hospital?”

When he came back to himself, he found himself crouched behind his couch for cover, letting out a single, sharp, surprised breath that was short of a scream.

“God damn it, Max,” he said, recovering, standing; the couch served as cover in more ways than one as he looked towards the windows where he really should have seen her before, standing there silhouetted by steely predawn light. 

“God damn it yourself, leaving without authorization,” she said, crossing the room to him. She turned the knob on a camp lantern, casting a gold glow over her face. 

“Discharged myself. What happened to you?” he asked. He wanted to approach her, but the couch was the only thing protecting his dignity, such as it was. Her eyes were ringed with bruises healing black and yellow. “Looks like a hell of a head injury.” 

He raised a hand to her, let it fall; fragments of their last conversation played in his head. 

“Yeah, it was a doozy,” she snorted. Something seemed funny to her. “You're naked, and you're worried about my head.” 

“No. I'm naked, and I'm worried about the fact that I woke up alone in a hospital room, obviously fine, only to come home and find you here, obviously not. Explain.”

But as soon as she opened her mouth, he turned around and walked into his bedroom, because standing there naked in the predawn in front of her wasn't doing his sense of masculinity any favors. She followed him, and he pretended to ignore her as he stepped into cargo pants and drew a t-shirt over his head, but she was staring. He could feel her eyes.

“I got your cure,” she said.

“Put that together myself,” he said. He tossed her a look over his shoulder, steeling himself for another sight of those bruises. His voice was tight when he said, “Thanks.”

“Yeah, no problem,” she snapped. Whatever she'd been looking for out of him, she apparently wasn't getting it.

So he walked back to stand in front of her, purposely standing just a little too close. Her eyes widened as she fought the instinct to step back. This close, he could better assess the bruising. Looked about three, four days old. Swelling almost gone, and only the outermost edges were still black, ringed around her eyes like spectacles. The camp light from the living room shone off staples glistening in her hair.

“When are those coming out?” he asked, pointing with his chin.

She reached up and touched them, grimacing. Then she shrugged. “When I get around to it.”

“Do it for you now, if you want,” he said. 

She looked down, then met his eyes and nodded.

So that's how he wound up with her on the floor between his feet and a pair of pliers in his hand, carefully prying out the metal teeth holding her scalp together. X5 accelerated healing had already done its work; the steel bindings came out easily, like pulling out freshly planted flowers. Ew. That was an image he could have done without. The sight of her glossy dark head between his thighs, though pointed the wrong way, was another image he could do without.

Why had he suggested this? She stoically sat there even when he had to fight with a stubborn staple and a bead of blood appeared. He'd wanted her to stay away from him. He'd wanted some peace from her. But she'd obviously gone to war for him, and he—dammit. He didn't want to miss a moment of her, even if she was playing him against Logan in some manipulative female game he didn't understand.

She reached up and squeezed his knee as he teased the last staple out. “Thanks,” she said, her voice a little thick.

“That sting?” he asked.

“Not as bad as getting my head split open in the first place.”

“And am I ever gonna get to hear that story?”

She shook her head. “It's over now. I don't know. Someday.”

“You talk to Logan since you been back?”

Her silence was longer this time, and she didn't look at him, and she didn't move her hand. Her palm burned him through the fabric of his pants, and he spared a moment to be amused that even literally _arisen from his deathbed,_ he was still helpless not to react to her. 

“I went to the hospital first,” she said at last.

“And you didn't feel like waiting? Had a nail appointment?”

“Well, you were taking forever to wake up—”

“Jesus Christ, Maxie, forgive me for taking awhile to _not die_ \--"

“--and Logan showed up,” she said, talking over him.

“So you snuck away.”

She turned her face into his thigh.

“And hid here,” he finished.

She nodded. 

He palmed her head over the bright red line of her fresh scar. Her hair was still matted with dried blood. She hadn't even showered first. Her scent was intense: blood and stress and dirt and sweat, but under it all, warm skin, clean blood. 

“I don't wanna talk about it,” she muttered, her forehead pressed against his thigh, “but it was... intense. And I wanted somewhere... not intense. To wait. I didn't want to do the whole mantle-of-leadership thing until I knew...”

Knew he was all right.

He'd heard the phrase “heart melted” in all kinds of gooey contexts and figured it was just one of those cliches that didn't actually describe something, but was more like an extended image—a heart of ice melted to a heart of flesh, that kind of thing. But there was a soft feeling in his chest he'd never felt before. Not even with Rachel—those emotions had been all bright and edgy with fear and surprise and wonder. This feeling flowed through him and—well, fuck his life, but it melted him.

She'd been bested and beaten, and somehow she'd won free to bring him the medicine to save his life. 

“Thank you.” His voice was breathless. She'd notice, but there was nothing he could do about it.

“You need a bath,” she said, not moving her face.

“So do you,” he said, rumpling her hair gently. 

“This bitch got water yet?” she asked, finally turning to look up at him, a faint smile on her lips.

“This bitch does,” he said solemnly, and was rewarded by her smile. 

X.  
They stood beneath the water.

“You gotta be kidding me with this water pressure,” Max groused, her back to him.

Not really his focus right now, but he could play along.

“I know, right? I can piss harder than this,” he said with a grin. She batted his stomach without looking back.

Healing bruises all over her. He wet the sponge he had to use—because seriously, the water pressure? He got better showers in a gentle rain—and gently ran it over her blackened flanks, petechial bruising like Rorschach inkblots on the backs of her thighs. She stood quietly under his ministrations, only shuddering when he slicked the soapy water off her smooth skin with his bare palm.

He was enormously, thickly aroused, and clumsy with it; he dropped the sponge more than once, his hands too numb to close properly. Or maybe he was still weak from the seizures. But he'd put his money on Max if he were forced to bet.

He wanted to touch her more, but he forced himself to focus. Cleaning Max. That was the mission. She'd been through hell and she deserved not to smell like a raw steak. So he soaped up the sponge and wrung it out over her head, massaging out the mats of dried blood and sweat, teasing out the knots and tangles with his fingers. She winced when he tugged too hard, but didn't complain; he could see the tension in the small, hard muscles of her shoulders, flinching down the more elegant muscles of her spine. 

When her hair finally rinsed clean, he allowed himself—it was conscious—to dip his head and run his lips along the wet line of her shoulderblades, flaring his fingers over her waist to pull her back against him so his body could explain his actions. He was tired of words. They both knew the stakes, they both knew his objections, but she was naked in a shower with him now and he was done. If circumstances shook out such that he had to hate himself for this later, well, he'd deal with it then. 

He wasn't even sure his previous argument still stood. He'd said those things before she'd gone and almost gotten *killed* for his sake. If that didn't deserve a ride, even if it meant nothing to her and everything to him, well? Hadn't she earned it?

He knew then how deep in it he was. He'd thought he'd been lost before, but now? He was seriously screwed.

He pressed his lips against the back of her long neck, tonguing the vertebrae that crested when she bent her head against his pressure. She moaned, and he answered her, his voice shaking. He slid a hand up her torso and cupped her breast, nipple hard as a metal ball bearing on his palm, generous flesh overflowing his grasp. His touch made her grind back against him, her perfect round ass socked against him with gorgeous pressure. A spear of bright heat shot through his spine, and he had to bite his tongue and solve a couple of quadratic equations on the fly to keep from embarrassing himself.

Aw, hell. Change of plans.

He turned her carefully, slowly, in his arms and caught her eyes with his. He silently begged her to trust him as he pressed her against the shower's wall and then went to his knees in front of her.

Her eyes went wide and terrified. No one had ever done this for her, had they? In the throes of her heat, it was all about cock inside her _now_ \--he knew enough about it to know that—and Logan had dicked away his chance and never looked into the miracle of dental dams. Because of course not.

He held her gaze as he kissed her inner thighs, lifting one of her legs onto his shoulders to grant him better access. Her breath sawed and shivered, on the edge of panic. Her fingers flexed anxiously on his shoulders, hard, and he could _feel_ her debating whether or not to shove him away. 

“Don't,” he said.

“But...” Her eyes were still glossy with fear.

He sucked another kiss onto her thigh, higher up. She wimpered and writhed, forcing him to wrap an arm around her ass to support her as she started to go limp. 

“I want to,” he said. “Please. Let me.”

Her cheeks were flaming. She avoided his eyes. 

“You're embarrassed.” That sentence needed a question mark, but he was just too aghast. “Max.”

“Guys say it smells bad and tastes bad,” she muttered.

Okay. Two ways to take that, both of them stupid, but it was obviously bothering her and this was, let's not forget, about her. He let her get her weight back on both her feet and stood up, closed into her space, boxed her in with his arms and put his face in hers.

“If you don't trust me yet, then I won't,” he said. He snatched a kiss from her because he couldn't help it, but he drew back as soon as he could force himself and stared into her eyes again. “But, Max, if you heard that as some locker room talk, it's just guys being jackasses. Going down on a woman is pretty damned intimate and generous and, so I've been told, my gender doesn't excel at those things.”

She looked away.

“And if someone said that specifically about you—give me a name, and the next time he says it, it'll be with a lisp.”

She muttered something, and he caught, “... never...” which meant he was right. 

“But you're not comfortable.”

She shook her head wordlessly.

He nodded. “All right then.”

She blinked, then smiled, bright with relief. “Really?” 

Helpless anger welled up inside him for all the clueless bastards who'd had her before. Nothing that's ever happened to her had been her own idea. And that realization made him step back from her, his hands open by his sides.

This was not going to be a repeat of her every other time. He was not going to hound and pressure her into anything. This was not about him.

He caught her eyes again, tipping his head to make sure she was seeing him.

“I'm for you,” he said. “You do what you want. You tell me what you want. Nothing else happens. Got it?”

X.  
She stared at him.

“I'm for you,” he'd said. 

It was the most ridiculous, most romantic thing anyone had ever said to her. 

She stepped to him and kissed him deeply, thrusting her tongue into his mouth, his cock a hot line against her lower stomach. Her arms around him seemed to be permission for him to put his arms around her, so she revised her understanding of the rules: he could do what she did to him. That seemed reasonable.

She broke the kiss and said: “Here's how this is going to go. I'm going to wash you, because you need it. And then?”

He gazed at her with his steady green eyes.

“I'm going to find Logan,” she said. “We gotta talk.”


End file.
